


The Dragon of Wanheda

by Marcus_S_Lazarus



Category: DreamWorks Dragons (Cartoon), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Dragons from Jurassic-Park-esque park, HtTYD now post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:54:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 63,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23560387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marcus_S_Lazarus/pseuds/Marcus_S_Lazarus
Summary: After the destruction of Mount Weather, Clarke's fascination with an old legend told by her father leads to her becoming part of a new world
Relationships: Clarke Griffin & Griffin (OC Dragon), Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III/Astrid Hofferson
Comments: 21
Kudos: 26





	1. The Dragon Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> In advance, I had to shift the timeline for when the events of "The 100" actually occurred up a century or so to fit the new world I'll be creating here, but considering that the exact dates aren't that important in the original series (by which I mean we never see anything to state that events _had_ to happen in 2149 specifically beyond it just giving us a useful frame of reference), I don't think it will make much difference, and the timeline of actual events is unchanged in terms of details such as how long the Ark was up in space before the 100 were sent down, I assure you.
> 
> On the topic of timelines, for the characters of "The 100", this story starts shortly after the end of Season Two, and everything experienced by the residents of the Ark, the inhabitants of Mount Weather, and the Coalition are the same as in canon; Clarke hasn't yet made contact with Niylah or anyone else after she started out on her own, but from here onwards, things are going to be different for Clarke Griffin in particular…
> 
> Also, thanks are owed to athingofvikings, who gave me a much-appreciated sounding-board for a few aspects of my planned world-building for this particular crossover; hope you like it.

" _Tell me about the dragons, Daddy!"_

" _The dragons?" Daddy looked at Clarke with a warm smile at her question as he sat on the edge of her bed, six-year-old Clarke Griffin already snuggled into her blankets with eager eyes. "Are you sure? You've heard it before-"_

" _But it's_ dragons _!" Clarke grinned at him. "The Nadders and the Zipplebackers and the Windstrikers and the Stormcutters and-"_

" _All right, all right," Daddy said, smiling indulgently at her as he reached into his pocket to pull out the faded but well-preserved pamphlet that he had kept there for as long as Clarke could remember._

" _Before the bombs fell and the Twelve Stations of the Ark came together," Daddy said, looking at Clarke with that teasing smile she loved so much, "the most remarkable place on Earth was the incredible place known as The Dragon Sanctuary."_

" _The Dragon Sanctuary?" Clarke said, eyes wide as she repeated the words she'd spoken the first time she'd heard Daddy tell this story. "But dragons are stories, aren't they?"_

" _Yes and no," Daddy replied with a smile. "Dragons themselves never existed in nature, but a few decades before the War, a great man called Hamish Haddock became so fond of the tales of dragons that he couldn't bear to live in a world where they would never exist. He became a doctor-"_

" _Like Mommy?"_

" _Like Mommy, but different," Daddy smiled. "Hamish Haddock learned how he could take bits from other animals, and worked out how to put them all together to create something new. He was even able to work out how to give dragons their legendary ability to breathe fire by giving them new organs that created chemicals that would burn when the dragons wanted them to."_

" _And he made them_ loyal _," Clarke said, smiling at the image in her mind. "People could train them and ride them and make friends with them-"_

" _Only in the Dragon Sanctuary, Clarke," Daddy corrected her, even as he smiled at her enthusiasm as he opened the pamphlet to show her the large map inside it. "On this isolated collection of islands in the north, everyone who could came to witness the wonders of the dragons, either enjoying the chance to explore the islands and see the dragons in nature, or taking part in brilliant quests to learn more about the world of dragons with their friends."_

" _And there were so many…" Clarke said, her fingers reaching out to almost touch the small pictures in the corner of the pamphlet as her father carefully turned its pages._

" _Oh yes," Daddy replied with a smile, leaning over so that they could both study the pictures in the pamphlet, depicting some of the most remarkable dragons. "The two-headed Zipplebacks, the powerful Gronkles, the glowing Flightmares, the bellowing Thunderdrums, the sleek Windstrikers, the majestic Night Furies… Hamish created a vast range of dragons, and that's just what he released in publicity material; there were even rumours of great king-dragons that could command all others, but Hamish Haddock made all who visited the Sanctuary swear that they would never tell others to maintain the mystery."_

" _There were mysteries?"_

" _Oh yes; this wasn't just a big zoo where people could see the dragons in cages. Hamish Haddock created a whole world where humans could interact with dragons as though they had existed back in the days of the Vikings, experiencing the world when it was so much simpler than it had become. People could take the simple option of challenging dragons as they raided human villages, or join forces with the dragons to complete great quests for ancient relics of a lost past…"_

" _Did you ever go to the Sanc'ry, Daddy?"_

" _I would have loved to see it for myself, but I never had the chance," Daddy smiled sympathetically at Clarke. "But my own grandpa was planning to go to the Sanctuary with his family before the bombs fell; they had been making plans once he finished his tour of duty on what became Alpha Station, and he even had this pamphlet on board to plan for the trip."_

" _And you kept it?"_

" _Passed down from parent to child until now," Daddy smiled at her. "I've studied it and everything else I could find about the Dragon Sanctuary as much as I could."_

" _Why?"_

" _Because they were the most incredible thing we ever did," Daddy explained. "Don't get me wrong, I know that I have an important place here, and the mere existence of the Ark proves what we can accomplish if we try, but when I think about the dragons… if I had lived back then before the bombs fell, I would have wanted nothing more than to see the Sanctuary."_

" _Do you think they survived?" Clarke asked, sitting up in bed to look curiously at Daddy. "Back on Earth?"_

" _The dragons?" Daddy asked, putting the pamphlet aside to give her question serious thought, the wistful smile replaced by solemn contemplation. "It's hard to say, really; the Dragon Sanctuary was in a relatively remote part of Earth, so there would have been no obvious reason for anyone to target it when the missiles were fired…"_

_He sighed, and suddenly Daddy looked so much older than he had been when Clarke was six, and he stared at her with a greater weight behind his eyes._

" _But on the other hand," he said, his tone reflecting a more solemn manner that he'd never have shown to Clarke at this age, "we're still not clear_ why _the missiles were fired in the first place… maybe someone took care to target the dragons in particular…"_

_As Clarke watched, his skin seemed to tighten around his face before it began to bulge out all over his body, blood streaming from his nose and eyes as he looked at her._

" _In the end," he said, now standing behind a glass door as Clarke stood on the other side of it, no longer a child but a nearly-grown teenager, "some dreams never come true, do they?"_

_Then his body spun over and backwards as the door behind him opened, and Clarke could only watch as Jake Griffin was sent flying out into space all over again, and all she could do was slam her hands against the glass door and scream…_

* * *

"NO!" Clarke sat up sharply, looking anxiously around herself in that first moment of panic before she calmed down as she took in her environment. She was still getting used to sleeping rough and on her own since she walked away from Camp Jaha after the destruction of Mount Weather, and she'd spent several nights on minimal sleep as she tried to adjust to her new routine, but she'd eventually managed to get 'relaxed' enough to trust herself to wake up if something tried to attack her while she was asleep.  
  
As Clarke tried to settle back down, she wished she knew why that dream kept troubling her. The ending moments as she relived her father's death were bad enough, but the memories it inspired after she woke up hurt just as much, remembering those innocent days when her father shared his childhood fascination with her, telling her all about the long-lost Dragon Sanctuary and the marvellous creatures that had lived here.  
  
She wasn't even sure if it was more painful for her to realise as she woke up that everything she'd seen so far proved that the dragons her father had so loved to think about were dead, or the fact that he'd had the Dragon Sanctuary pamphlet in his pocket when he was floated, which meant that she had lost every physically written record that dragons had ever truly existed.  
  
Even when she'd actually come to the ground, amid the chaos and urgency of their own need to survive, Clarke had done her best to try and find out if anyone else knew anything more about the Sanctuary, but her efforts had met with failure. Dragons might have once existed, but during her brief talks with the Triku, when she'd been able to talk to anyone about something that wasn't related to war, she'd asked a few tentative questions and had heard nothing to suggest that they even knew what dragons were, never mind any hints that they'd ever seen something that might match their description.  
  
It was tragic, but in a grim way, Clarke supposed it was inevitable; if the dragons had been bred in captivity, even if they'd escaped the worst of the nuclear fallout, they had probably just died out after the surviving humans abandoned the park to come together somewhere else.  
  
 _Once again, humanity screwed up a great gift, and now all I have is another dream reminding me of the many ways in which I let Dad down…_


	2. Arrow Station's Sole Survivor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place just a few days after the last chapter; enjoy the results as these two worlds start to come together…

It hadn't taken long since leaving Camp Jaha for Clarke to recognise that she could have thought things through more clearly.

She was still certain that she'd made the right decision to get away from the rest of the Ark after everything that had happened- she needed to get away from everything that reminded her of what she'd done in Mount Weather- but she could have taken a little time to gather more supplies than the gun in her hand and the clothes on her back. As it was, once she'd reached the forest she'd spent her first couple of nights resting in trees if she could find a sufficiently wide branch at a decent height, choosing branches that weren't so high that she couldn't reach it but high enough that most animals couldn't get to her and most humans wouldn't spot her unless they actively looked up. After those first couple of nights proved the theory, she'd turned her attention to the matter of defending herself, managing to create a basic 'hammer' with a thick rock and a sturdy branch combined with some creepers that she'd used to kill a fox that had found her one evening.

The next couple of hunts hadn't been pleasant, but after using one of her last bullets on a grizzly bear that had almost killed her, she'd a couple of early hunts, she'd managed to make a tentative trade of the bear's carcass for a decent knife and a wolf-skin that she could use as a blanket. Her weapons were still limited and her experience at surviving out here was essentially all self-taught, but at least she knew she wasn't going to starve to death.

With her supply issues dealt with, Clarke had spent the last week or so walking away from the areas she'd already visited, and could only hope that her current path was leading her in the direction of what she was looking for. With the knowledge that her people were safe for the immediate future, and no urgent need for her to act as the leader she'd been forced to be ever since arriving on Earth, she had made up her mind that her first goal would be to visit the ocean, and she'd work out her next move from there.

The walk had been a long one, of course, but she'd spent enough time studying the maps of Mount Weather and the surrounding country to at least be sure that she was walking in the right direction; so long as she kept an eye out for the appropriate landmarks, she was cautiously optimistic that she'd hit the coastline soon enough.

Her first experience with water on Earth might have led to Octavia and Jasper nearly getting killed, but no matter what possible dangers might exist in the ocean, Clarke wanted to see it at least once.

When she finally climbed over a hill and found herself looking at the long spread of blue that indicated the sea, Clarke came close to sitting down and succumbing to her exhaustion now that her goal was in visual range, but when she saw the vast metal object lying on the coastline, a new surge of energy struck her.

Virtually all of the exterior struts and pylons had been burnt or torn off as it came through the atmosphere, and the large dome at the end of it must have been lost during its final descent, but she had studied the history of the Ark long enough to recognise Arrow Station when it was separated from the rest of the station.

"Oh God…" Clarke whispered to herself, eyes widening and a tentative grin on her face as she made her way down the hill towards the crashed station. If she was right that people didn't come this far out among the clans she'd encountered so far, it may be that she was the first person from the rest of the Ark who'd made it out to this particular crash-site.

She still wasn't ready to go back to her friends and family after everything she'd had to sacrifice to save them, but if she could just find a few survivors here, she might be able to do something for them, and maybe she could even actually _save_ someone without having to kill anyone else…

The closer she came to the fallen station, however, the easier it was to see that there was nothing she could do to help anyone there. Arrow Station had apparently been fortunate enough to strike the edge of a sloping cliff, so it had come to a comparatively smooth stop at first, but when it hit the sea rather than just exhausting its momentum on its own, the resulting backlash and rapid temperature shift had basically pulverized what was left that might have still been inhabited. A few interior fires were still burning even weeks after the initial impact, and Clarke could see no sign of human activity around it, which made it clear that nobody had survived the crash to do anything with the remains.

As she took in the tragedy before her, Clarke was briefly lost in a new wave of grief and frustration with herself for ever believing that Earth would give her a chance to save a life, but she soon fought down the tears that threatened to come from her eyes and continued to walk forward. Even if everyone on the station had died, she could still see what she could do about giving them a decent burial before she started working on salvaging anything for herself; Mount Weather's residents had been left where they fell, but she would see what she could do for these people. Picking up her pace as she ran through the trees, Clarke kept her gaze fixed on the rising smoke that indicated the presence of the station, but her advance came to an abrupt halt when she heard a loud roar from the beach up ahead.

"Crap," she said, keeping her voice low as she considered the implications of that particular roar. She still had a couple of bullets in her gun if she was dealing with a predator that had taken up residence in Arrow Station, but she'd prefer to save them for when she was absolutely certain she had no other option but to kill something, and no other way to guarantee that she could pull it off.

Taking a deep breath, she checked her back for the 'war-hammer' she'd created earlier and shifted the pace of her approach to the beach, maintaining a brisk pace that focused on hiding behind trees and rocks as she made her way towards her target. As she drew closer to the large burn-mark left by the crashed station, Clarke noticed a few bodies lying around, but for the moment she refused to look at them too closely; if she was about to face the predator that had done… anything… to them, looking at its handiwork wouldn't help anything.

As she left the forest and walked on the edge of the beach, Clarke's first clear glimpse of Arrow Station confirmed her earlier assessment. The main body of the station was reasonably intact, but after the various external struts had been torn off, the station itself had taken some serious damage, ranging from obvious burns around the area where the struts had been to a couple of points along the station that had clearly exploded outwards at some point during the descent.

However, Clarke's private debate on whether or not she should try and examine the station's interior right now came to an abrupt end when she saw the source of the roar she'd heard earlier. Taking in the sight of the creature lying on the beach a short distance from the station, Clarke couldn't restrain a broad smile spreading across her face for the first time since Mount Weather had fallen.

The creature's colour was a surprising shade of deep red tinted with orange that she hadn't expected to see on this particular breed- she was sure that the picture in the pamphlet had been blue with hints of yellow- and obviously the pictures had done little to demonstrate the scale of the creatures compared to humans, but there was no way she could be looking at anything other than one of the creatures that had been the subject of her father's lifelong fascination.

"A _dragon_ ," Clarke all but whispered to herself, still smiling as she studied the creature. "You're still alive…"

She didn't know if there were more dragons or if this one was just the unlikely sole survivor, but either way, Clarke felt like she'd almost walked into a dream; after months of believing they'd been wiped out along with everything else that had been good and fascinating about Earth, she was actually looking at a _dragon_. Mind racing over the long-lost but never-forgotten pamphlet as she studied the creature, she soon confirmed her initial identification of it as a Windstriker based on her father's tales of the various dragons in the Sanctuary; smooth skin, a long neck and tail with wide jagged wings stretching out from a squat but sturdy central body, short arms and long muscular legs, spikes sticking out all over its back with a single large horn on the tip of its snout and a smaller horn under its chin…

Despite her initial joy at this discovery, it didn't take long for Clarke's smile to falter as she studied the dragon in depth. In general the creature presented the imposing presence she'd always enjoyed imagining when she heard her father's stories, but that smile faltered when she took in the way the dragon was crouched and the unpleasant angle at which it held its right wing.

"You're hurt," she said, voice rising as she stepped forward. As though it had only just registered her presence, the dragon turned to look at her, letting out a low growl as it tensed its shoulders despite the accompanying wince of pain.

"Easy!" Clarke said, tossing her hammer to the side and raising her hands in a gesture of surrender, praying that this dragon was intelligent enough to recognise that she wasn't intending to harm it; from what she remembered, Windstrikers just attacked their foes with extremely hot air rather than actually breathing fire, but that was still dangerous if she took a blast of it to the face. "I'm just here to help you; you're OK, do you hear me? You're OK, you're safe, I'm not going to hurt you…"

As the dragon snarled at her, Clarke noted that it seemed to be slightly less hostile towards her than it had been in its 'introductory' growl. It was still giving off a low rumble in its throat, but it seemed to be slightly more hesitant about acting aggressively towards her, as though it was starting to recognise that she wasn't going to cause it any further pain.

Whenever she looked back on that moment later on, Clarke could never explain what had prompted her next decision, but as the dragon looked at her, still snarling in pain and fear, she raised her arms and began to hum loudly while carefully walking towards the creature. Recalling a tune from one of the films her father had managed to find on what remained of the Internet, depicting a bitter knight forming a friendship with the last living dragon, Clarke began to hum the tune, watching with a smile as the dragon looked at her, curiosity gradually replacing its hostility. As the tune built to its crescendo, Clarke lowered her arms, her left falling to her side as she held out her right hand and slowly advanced towards the dragon, timing her breaths to match the tune she was humming without breaking the rhythm.

Finally, when she and the dragon were so close that the dragon's nose was practically in front of her, Clarke steeled herself and reached out towards the dragon's face, the creature responding to her action by taking that final step forward so that she was now touching it directly. For a moment Clarke was startled, but soon relaxed and began to stroke the creature, its scales surprisingly warm despite the fact that it was naturally a lizard that she would have expected to be cold-blooded.

"Wow…" she said, smiling tentatively at the dragon. "Hey there…"

As she reached her hand around to stroke the Windstriker's lower jaw, she scratched a certain point and the dragon suddenly fell to the ground, letting out a blissful moan as it rolled over onto its left side to leave its injured wing exposed. A quick glance down its body revealed something that Clarke was going to interpret as a sign that this dragon was male, mainly because she had to think of it as some kind of gender and things sticking out felt more masculine than feminine to her.

"Ouch," Clarke said, walking over to carefully examine the wing. This close up, she could see the way its wing had bent, along with a couple of nasty-looking cuts in the membrane. She couldn't be sure exactly how this injury had happened, but given that this creature was close to Arrow Station, she guessed that the dragon had gone to investigate the crashed station shortly after it 'landed', and something had fallen off Arrow Station to strike the Windstriker's wing. When she glanced back at the station, she even saw a couple of holes in the lower half of the station with metal piled around them on the sand that might have been the exact place where the dragon had been injured, even if it was impossible to be sure what hole might have caused the injury.

Clarke hated herself for even thinking it, but she was suddenly glad of that minor collapse; if this dragon hadn't been forces to stay here, she would have never known that these incredible creatures still existed…

Putting that momentary ambiguous thought aside, Clarke turned her attention back to the assessing the condition of the dragon's wing. Judging by the twisted angle of the wing and the scratches around the wound, Clarke guessed that the dragon had managed to remove whatever piece of Arrow Station had caused the damage, but it was clear to Clarke that the Windstriker couldn't do anything more to help itself.

"OK," Clarke took a deep breath as she looked at the still-'dozing' dragon. "Just… wait there… I'm here to help you…"

As the dragon began to stir, Clarke ran her hands cautiously over the damaged wing, feeling her way along the twisted limb until she found the point where the bone had been broken. She quickly moved to 'slot' the bone back into place just as the dragon got up, the dragon letting out a brief pained roar as it turned to face her before its snarl shifted to a more curious stare as it realised what she had done.

"How's that?" Clarke looked at the dragon with a tentative smile, her hands still on the injured wing. "I still need to tie this together, and you should probably give it a little time to heal, but if you don't strain yourself, you should be good as new… soon… I think…"

Clarke wished that she sounded more positive about that, but when dealing with a species she'd never expected to encounter as a reality, the best she could do was hope that her existing knowledge of biology could be adapted to treat this dragon.

"You probably shouldn't fly until we're sure this is healed," she continued, her hands tentatively running over the injured wing, "but if you'll trust me, I think I can help you get better…"

The dragon looked at her with an expression that Clarke would have called thoughtful if it wasn't for the fact that she didn't know how intelligent the dragon was, before it reached out to butt her chest with its nose, rumbling at her in an approving manner.

"Thanks," Clarke said, tentatively stroking the dragon's horn. "So… what do I call you? I mean, you're pretty much stuck here until I can get your wing back in working order, so if we're spending time together, I'd prefer to have something specific to call you rather than 'dragon' or 'Windstriker'… Wells?"

The look the dragon gave her somehow managed to seem condescending even if she doubted the Windstriker understood her exact words.

"Yeah, probably not…" Clarke acknowledged; Wells had been a good friend, but he didn't have the strength that would fit with this dragon. She had already ruled out naming it after anyone who was still alive, and she didn't know anyone in Mount Weather she wanted to honour in that manner. She briefly considered 'Bowen' or 'Draco', but even if that film had helped her tame the dragon, naming it after a fictional character felt like she would be cheapening the nature of its existence. Assuming she was right about the dragon being male, 'Anya' was also off as an option, and she definitely wasn't going to name this guy 'Finn', while 'Jake' seemed like a strange name for a dragon…

When the idea hit her, she was amazed it hadn't been her first choice.

"Griffin?" she looked at the dragon with a hopeful smile. As though in response, the dragon let out a low rumble that seemed to suggest satisfaction, looking at Clarke in a manner that she could swear was a smile.

"OK then," Clarke nodded at the dragon. "Griffin it is."

Maybe people would think that she had named this dragon after herself, but as far as Clarke was concerned, this dragon had just been named after her father, who had spent so many years dreaming about the dragons he believed to be dead. If she couldn't bring him to the ground directly, she would give this dragon a name that would honour him and everything he'd meant to her over the years, and do her best to care for it the way he would have wanted her to.

 _This could be the last dragon on Earth, and I am_ not _going to leave it to suffer from that wing if I can help it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can anyone identify the film that had such an influence on Clarke's attempts to train her dragon?


	3. Bonding

Crouching behind a tree, Clarke preyed that her scant hunting lessons were adequate for the new responsibility she'd taken onto herself. It had been difficult enough to keep track of everything she'd learned with the rest of the 100- it wasn't that she hadn't wanted to learn how to hunt, but she had been more focused on keeping them alive and helping the Ark come down- but with so few people apparently hunting in this part of the forest, she'd been able to make a few good catches easily enough. Using some of the smaller metal shards from Arrow Station, she'd managed to make herself a few good arrowheads, recall some 'lessons' she'd received during the alliance with the Grounders to make a decent bow, and was even making plans to create a kind of sword for herself back at the station.

For the moment, however, she was about to test her new bow and arrows on a hunt, and she just hoped she hadn't forgotten everything she'd picked up during that time. Her instructors in the Coalition had been particularly edge when it came to teaching her anything of actual use, as though either worried she'd use it against them or resenting the simple fact that they had to do this in the first place, but she had done her best to pick up the essentials. After waling for a few minutes, a deer came into the field, and Clarke took a moment before releasing her arrow, nodding in satisfaction as she struck the deer in the side. The deer tried to run away, but the arrow had clearly hobbled it enough for Clarke to launch another arrow, striking it in the back before it could get too far away.

Walking up to the deer, Clarke took a moment to confirm that it was dead before she crouched down and slung it over her shoulders. The weight was a challenge, but it was the easiest way to get the catch to the ship, Clarke soon falling back on the route she was most familiar with after her last few days hunting. She checked a couple of snares she'd set up on the way, but it didn't take long to confirm that there was nothing there, leaving her free to focus on getting the deer to her home.

 _Home_ …

Clarke paused for a moment as she leant against the tree to think about that.

She freely acknowledged that Arrow Station wasn't going to be a permanent home- if nothing else, the idea of basically living where so many people had died felt uncomfortable at best- but it was the first place she'd stayed in since arriving on Earth where she felt like she had any sense of genuine peace. She might have spent the last few days struggling to catch fish to keep Griffin fed while she worked on finding parts of the station she could adapt into weapons with her own meagre knowledge of metallurgy, but she was away from the pressures of trying to protect people who seemed to constantly find something to complain about no matter how she tried to help them, she currently had no enemies to deal with or major challenges to overcome, and she had even met a remarkable creature who accepted her efforts to help him without question.

She didn't know what would happen once Griffin was healed, but she felt a true sense of hope for the first time since her arrest after her father's death…

With that thought, she resumed her walk towards the crashed station, arriving at the beach after less than an hour's walk since she caught the deer. Griffin let out an approving roar from his position by the station upon seeing her, and Clarke raised a hand to give him an approving wave.

"Hey there," she smiled, nodding in approval as she walked past the dragon. She had managed to find a couple of suitably thin strips of metal to help keep the dragon's injured wing together, using a few vines and creepers to tie the metal to the wing. Clarke still wasn't sure if Griffin was ready to fly on his own, as he still winced whenever he tried to move the wing too quickly, but so long as she kept on catching enough fish and meat to feed them both, he seemed to be doing all right.

"Doing well, Griff?" she asked, smiling as Griffin gave an affirmative-sounding roar in response before she indicated the deer over her shoulders. "I still need to work on skinning our supper, but it should be ready soon; just call if you need me, right?"

After Griffin had roared in that affirmative manner once again, Clarke went into the remains of Arrow Station and set to work skimming the fur from her catch. She still hadn't reached the power where she could get all of the fur off an animal in one piece, but with a suitably sharp piece of metal from the station walls that she'd adapted into a dagger, she could get the corpse to a point where she could be sure she and Griffin could eat it without worrying about the fur.

Granted, fur probably wasn't a particular concern for Griffin's diet, but she liked to think he appreciated the effort…

* * *

Sitting outside, Clarke smiled as her efforts to rub sticks together finally sparked off a blaze. The one disadvantage of Griffin being the last dragon was that his heated air blasts weren't that much use at starting fires, but it had encouraged her to improve her own skills in that area, and it some ways it was probably fairer to improve herself rather than relying on him for something that basic. Sitting back and positioning the skinned deer above the fire, Clarke smiled as she saw Griffin looking curiously at the fire.  
  
"Yeah, I get that it probably doesn't make a difference to you, but it tastes better to me," she smiled over at him. For a moment, it genuinely looked like Griffin 'shrugged' at her before he lay back down, watching the flame cook the meat as Clarke turned it on its makeshift spit for the next few moments.  
  
"You know, Griffin," Clarke mused, looking at the dragon as he looked at her, "of everything I hoped I'd find when I was sent down to Earth, you're pretty much the only thing that hasn't basically let me down."  
  
She still didn't know for sure if Griffin understood anything she was saying to him, but it was nice to have at least _someone_ to talk to about everything in her life right now, particularly someone who seemed to genuinely want to listen to her side rather than form an opinion and then define her own words by that view rather than change their own.  
  
"I mean," she continued, as she moved to feel carefully at his injured wing, "we have randomly mutated animals, society basically collapsed and reverted to a tribal state, the most 'civilised' people on the planet had no problem basically dissecting other people for their own benefit… God, when I think about it, even _we_ were total screw-ups; we came down here and acted like we were entitled to it all even after we learned there were actual survivors…"  
  
Looking up as the dragon's head reached towards her, Clarke smiled and rubbed his nose with her hand, Griffin giving a low rumble of pleasure in return.  
  
"That's my point," Clarke smiled at him. "You're here, and you're not judging me for anything I couldn't control or trying to eat me because you're hungry; I'm helping you, and you're… well, OK, you haven't done anything to help me yet, but I like to think you'd do it if the need arose, right?"  
  
This time Clarke was _sure_ the dragon nodded at her, reaching out with one paw to rub her leg with his claw as he rumbled reassuringly at her. Smiling back at him, Clarke decided it was time to deal with the next part of her current evening routine.  
  
"Show me," she said, standing up to examine the dragon's wing. As Griffin extended his wing, Clarke carefully felt around the damaged bone and her makeshift splint, noting a wince of pain from the dragon as she examined the 'danger area' before she moved on.  
  
"OK," she looked at him as he turned to study her. "Based on the rate of healing, we're still going to need a few days before you can get airborne again, but the membrane seems to be coming together again nicely; don't strain yourself, and I think you'll be fine by the end of the week."  
  
Reaching over for the spit, Clarke held her hand over the meat for a few moments and then stepped back in a smile. "I think it's ready now; let's cut it."  
  
Nodding in understanding, Griffin extended his neck out, letting out a brief burst of hut air that blew out the fire beneath it before he jabbed downwards with the sharp horn on his chin. The tip sliced through the cooked meat as Clarke pulled the spit out, leaving it to fall into the burnt branches below it in two halves. Griffin reached down to swallow his half in one gulp while Clarke used the small knife she had created to start cutting chunks of it off for herself.  
  
The dragon was a strange dining companion, but he was an easy listener, and Clarke got the impression that he was showing a certain interest in her stories even if she wasn't sure how _intelligent_ he was…  
  
Clarke only realised that she'd been staring at Griffin's back when he reached over to nudge her side, his neck lowered and his back wiggling slightly as he looked at her.  
  
"Wait a… are you serious?" Clarke looked at him with a smile, before her expression faltered. "You know that you shouldn't be flying right now, right?"  
  
After Griffin nodded at her, Clarke slung her leg over his neck, at about the point where the neck joined the dragon's main body, settling down at a point just behind the last long spike on his back. The spike in front provided a useful means of support, and the one at Clarke's back helped her feel more secure as she settled into position on the dragon's back, but she still made a note that she would have to get a saddle sorted out if she wanted to make this arrangement more long-term…  
  
"Griffin?" Clarke looked at the dragon, who was now looking at her with what she could swear was a smile. "Does this mean… when you're better…?"  
  
The way Griffin extended his wings and roared was all the answer Clarke needed.  
  
"Thank you!" she grinned, jumping off to hug the dragon's face, heart filled with a warm joy that she hadn't felt since her father's death.  
  
He still needed time to heal, but from everything he'd just 'said' to her… the way he'd let her climb onto him without complaint…  
  
 _She was going to fly with a dragon_ …


	4. The Other Rider

Standing beside Griffin as she examined his wing, a couple of days after he had expressed his willingness to take her for a flight, Clarke wasn't entirely sure if she was just eager to get the chance to take him up on his offer, but as far as she could tell the joint seemed like it was completely healed. There might be a faint line around the break when she felt it as closely as she dared, but she couldn't find anything that didn't seem like the natural result of an injury having healed over.

 _Maybe I just want to get away before I have to start seriously worrying about finding a new place to leave his shit, but this_ does _feel like it's healed._

"OK," she said, stepping back from the dragon to give him a tentative smile. "This… this is it, I guess. Your wing feels like it's better now, but just take it easy at first, and then we'll-"

Further words were rendered pointless as Griffin flapped his wings downwards and lifted himself up into the air, letting out a triumphant roar in the process. His wings beat slowly, but the dragon moved rapidly through the air, building up speed as he looped and banked all over the sky, occasionally letting out an enthusiastic roar as he enjoyed his restored flight. Back on the ground, Clarke smiled in satisfaction at the sight of her dragon friend back in his element, until he suddenly banked his wings and came back down to land back on the beach beside her. For a moment Clarke stepped back, unable to shake the initial fear that he was about to turn on her like so many other things had on the ground, before Griffin shrugged his slender shoulders and looked at her with a quizzical stare.

"You… you're still up for that?" Clarke asked, her grin becoming even broader at the idea of what the dragon was offering her; the promise he'd made when he was healing was one thing, but the fact that he was still willing to make this offer when his wing seemed to be healed… that Griffin wanted her to get onto his back even when he didn't _have_ to stay with her…

The moment was ruined when a net suddenly dropped over Griffin, weights holding his wings on the ground as four figures in leather leant their own presence to the large stones. Clarke took a step forward to try and help him, but she suddenly found a pair of arms wrapped around her, followed by a sixth figure grabbing Griffin's mouth and strapping a large leather belt around it.

Confirming that she didn't recognise any of the people around her, along with their unfamiliar tattoo patterns, Clarke swiftly focused on her own enemy, awkwardly kicking upwards and behind herself so that her foot struck a point between her would-be captor's legs. Twisting her head as far around as she could, Clarke found herself looking at an older man with long brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and an athletic build, but didn't allow herself time to think about his potential physical advantages as she pulled her knife out of her belt and stabbed him in the side. The wound wouldn't do much long-term, but it sent her attacker staggering back far enough for Clarke to follow it up with a kick to his chest, leaving her to turn her attention to the rest of this man's group where they had gathered around her dragon.

As though acting on a cue, Griffin swept his tail out, knocking the two attackers closest to his tail off their feet. Kicking upwards with his rear legs, Griffin was able to create enough of an updraft to knock the other two hunters holding down the net away from him, but the sixth member of the hunting party was still holding tightly onto his muzzle. For a moment Clarke hoped that the loss of the other four hunters would give Griffin a chance to fly away, but she quickly realised that his wings had become tangled with the net. Even if the dragon could get off the ground, the extra weight of the net would hinder his attempts to actually do anything, and she didn't want to risk him trying to break the net on his own in case it re-injured his just-healed wing. Lost for a better option, Clarke literally leapt onto the nearest man to force him to the ground, kicking out as another man came up behind her while simultaneously slamming her current opponent's head into the ground.

Getting back to her feet as she looked at Griffin, one man unconscious while the other was gasping for air, Clarke was relieved to see that the dragon was unharmed apart from the leather strip keeping his mouth shut, but the net was tangled around his wings and she didn't have the time to get it off with their attackers still gathered around him. If she ran off, she might be able to draw some of the men away, but that would leave Griffin basically defenceless thanks to the hindrance of that net and muzzle if even one of the men stayed behind to deal with him, and she had no guarantee that these people wouldn't just capture him as a trophy or even kill him for food while she was away.

Maybe some people would say that it was stupid to risk her life for an animal, but even if she wasn't talking about what may be the last dragon on Earth, Griffin had put so much trust in her over the last few days that Clarke couldn't just abandon him…

Rolling off the man she'd just knocked out, Clarke scrambled back to her feet and lashed out with a punch at the man charging towards her, smiling in satisfaction as she saw blood erupt from the man's lips and a tooth or two fly from his mouth. Adjusting her grip on her knife, Clarke was able to stab a third attacker in the arm as he tried to grab her, pulling it out and slashing at a fourth man. As the man pressed his hand to his bleeding chest, Clarke knocked him back with a kick to the chest and spun around to find the bearded man approaching her with a raised sword. Clarke raised her knife, knowing that she had virtually no chance of fending him off but determined to try something-

A blast of what Clarke could only think of as purple fire struck the ground in front of her, sending her would-be attacker flying backwards. With her other attackers frozen in shock at this twist, Clarke looked up and found herself staring in awe at the sight of another dragon flying through the air. Until Griffin, this one was significantly shorter even from a distance, completely black in colour, with a very short neck and a wide face, as well as multiple fins along its long tail.

However, what struck Clarke most about the creature was that there was someone on its back. The dragon was moving too quickly for her to see the rider clearly, but she could see brown lines against the dragon's black body, and it was possible to observe a figure squatting on its back when the dragon turned its body in the right manner.

 _There are more_ , Clarke thought to herself, grinning as the black dragon swung around through the air and began to head back towards the now-deserted beach. _Griffin_ isn't _the last… there are more dragons… and people_ ride _them…_

Clarke didn't know where that other man had come from or how he'd tamed that dragon, but he was clearly not on the same side as her current attackers, so she was going to assume he was here to help her and Griffin until he proved otherwise. As the sword-wielder scrambled to his feet, Clarke lunged for a man who was about to grab Griffin by the head, knocking him down with such force that his arm snapped as it hit a rock, leaving Griffin free to swing his head around and knock another attacker back into the woods. Taking up position alongside her dragon, Clarke briefly flinched as more purple blasts hit the ground, but a glance behind confirmed that the other dragon had just destroyed the rocks that had been holding the net down, allowing Griffin to spread his wings and tear the net to pieces with a muffled roar. As the black dragon and its rider came towards the ground, the man with the sword yelled something that prompted his remaining conscious men to run back into the woods, holding their injuries and abandoning their two unconscious comrades.

As soon as she'd confirmed that the attackers were running away, Clarke's full attention was focused on Griffin, cutting through the leather strap holding his mouth shut before a faint sound prompted her to turn around, revealing that the black dragon had landed beside her and its rider had gotten off.

Looking clearly at this strange new arrival for the first time, Clarke was surprised to see that the rider was a young man who didn't seem to be that much older than her. He was wearing a brown leather vest over a red shirt with green trousers, and he had thick messy brown hair and a faint scar on his chin, his appearance lean and thin in a manner that nevertheless gave a sense of purpose and strength. What struck Clarke most keenly about him was that his left leg was a complex-looking system of metal and wood from below the knee, still a primitive design compared to some that she'd seen up on the Ark but nevertheless far more advanced than she would have expected from grounder 'technology' so far. For a moment Griffin growled at this new arrival, but then the black dragon essentially barked (Clarke couldn't think of a better term for it) at Griffin and her dragon seemed to calm down, sitting back slightly and raising his head to look curiously at the black dragon.

"Uh… hi?" Clarke said at last, after the young man had spent the last few moments looking curiously at her.

"…Hi," the young man replied, in a cautious tone that immediately suggested to Clarke that English wasn't his first language even if he knew it. "Are you… all right?"

"We're fine, thanks to you," Clarke said, moving slightly so that she was standing beside Griffin, not so close as to be considered a threat but close enough that it should be clear to both man and dragon that she was sticking to her dragon. "How did you find us?"

"I was tracking… another dragon… that had been flying this way, and I heard your Windstriker roaring," the boy explained. "We took a detour, I saw six on one with a dragon in the middle of it, and… well, I'd normally stay out of someone's private business, but when you were outnumbered _and_ trying to defend this guy… I got curious."

"Believe me, I'm not complaining if you decided to help out," Clarke said, reaching out to stroke Griffin's neck. "If you hadn't shown up… I mean, Griffin's wing only just finished healing…"

"He was injured?" the young man looked at the dragon with new curiosity.

"I think Griffin broke his wing against… well, that," Clarke waved her hand at the remains of Arrow Station. "I found him a couple of weeks ago, and I spent some time getting his wing back in order."

"And he's the first dragon you've met?"

"Yeah," Clarke nodded, looking at him with new curiosity. "How did you know?"

"You were looking at Toothless here with too much surprise if you were familiar with dragons," the young man explained.

"Toothless?" Clarke repeated, looking at the black dragon in surprise. As though in response, the black dragon opened its mouth to reveal toothless gums, only for teeth to spring out of those gums as Clarke watched. "Whoa… retractable teeth?"

"Yeah, it's pretty cool," the boy shrugged, before looking curiously at her. "So, if your dragon's Griffin… who are you?"

"Clarke," Clarke decided to say, fingers crossed that her actual name wasn't public knowledge yet; from what she'd seen, there weren't that many blondes of her shade among the grounders, so descriptions were likely to focus on details like that and this man hadn't reacted to her appearance. "And you are?"

"Hiccup," the boy replied.

"Hiccup?" Clarke repeated in surprise.

"Tribal tradition," the now-named Hiccup shrugged with a sheepish smile. "Runt of the litter gets called a hiccup."

"Ah," Clarke nodded, deciding not to ask for more information about something that was likely a sensitive issue as she turned her attention to focus on Toothless, searching her memory for her father's old tales of the various dragon species before turning back to the dragon's rider. "So… he's a Night Fury, right?"

"Yeah," Hiccup nodded, looking at her with new curiosity. "You know about them?"

"Just… well, my dad was a big fan of them," Clarke shrugged. "He told me a lot of stories about them when I was growing up, and I was always fascinated by them, and when I found Griffin injured… well, I had to help him."

"Looks like you did a good job," Hiccup said, walking over to examine Griffin's wing as Toothless moved to stand in front of her dragon, the two dragons exchanging low growls. "I mean, considering you never treated a dragon before, this is pretty good…"

"My mom trained me as a healer; it wasn't hard to adapt that experience to a broken wing," Clarke shrugged. "What about Toothless? Where did you meet him?"

"In the woods by my village," Hiccup explained, taking his hand from Griffin's wing to look at Clarke with a slight shrug. "He was… well, he was wounded, and I helped him get back in the air."

"Wounded?" Clarke repeated, looking over the black dragon before her gaze settled on the red fin on Toothless's tail, which she now saw was connected to the saddle via a complex set of cables. "That's artificial? You _made_ that?"

"Took a while to work it out, but… well, here we are," Hiccup shrugged, looking at Griffin for a moment before he looked back at Clarke. "So, if your dragon's healthy… do you have anywhere to go now?"

"Not… exactly," Clarke said, a tentative smile spreading across her face as she considered the implications of what she thought her new acquaintance was leading up to. "I just… I wanted to get away from everyone back home for a while…"

"Well," Hiccup stepped back to smile at her, "it won't exactly be quiet, but if you like dragons and want to get away for a bit, I think I might have something to offer."

As far as Clarke was concerned, that was all he needed to say.

"Let's go," she said, sliding into position on Griffin's back, the spines making a surprisingly comfortable 'seat' for her. "How long?"

"Just a few hours," Hiccup replied as he got back onto Toothless himself. "Depending on how fast you are, of course…"


	5. Clarke to the Edge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify in advance, when I refer to 'trader's tongue' as a language, it's intended to refer to English as characters like Johann and other traders never felt a need to develop another language after the attacks as they were constantly on the move, unlike how Trigendlish was implied to be developed to communicate in a manner the Mountain Men couldn't understand and the people of the Archipelago would have eventually started speaking Norse for reasons I'll explore over time. I won't write detailed extracts in other languages, but I'll always make it clear who's meant to be able to understand what, so I hope you enjoy the result regardless.

Looking at the newest-discovered dragon rider as she flew after him, her Windstriker maintaining a fairly good pace as the dragon followed Toothless, Hiccup wondered if he was being too trusting in making this kind of invitation on such a brief acquaintance. He didn't recognise the attire of any of the people who'd been trying to capture Clarke or her dragon, which at least suggested that they weren't traditional hunters like the kind working for Ryker, but the fact that they'd been trying to kill the dragon while Clarke tried to protect it at least earned her the benefit of the doubt, and since she hadn't expressed any desire to go back to her own tribe, it couldn't hurt to give her the option of joining them at the Edge.

It was probably a risky decision, but Hiccup had a feeling that he could trust Clarke even this early in their association, and at least he could offer Astrid some clear evidence as to why this couldn't be a repeat of their initial meeting with Heather. Glancing back at his new associate, he was glad to see that she seemed to be adjusting well; she'd started out just perched on the dragon's back, but just like the rest of his 'team' on that first flight to Dragon Island, Clarke turned out to be a quick study despite her inexperience, swiftly grasping the essentials of how to find a comfortable posture and maintain her balance without significantly affecting her dragon's natural flight pattern.

"Doing good back there?" he called back to her, once again reminding himself to use the trader tongue rather than Norse. He was glad that his father had always insisted he and the other young Vikings learn the language to deal with Johann on their own rather than relying on others to do the talking, although he wondered how Clarke had come to use it.

"Getting to grips with it, anyway," Clarke replied, smiling back at him as the dragon- 'Griffin', Hiccup reminded himself- briefly picked up the pace to move closer to Toothless before it fell back once again. Hiccup made a mental note to check over the information they had on Windstrikers as soon as he had the time; he was aware of the dragon's type, but it wasn't a species they'd encountered before now, so they'd need to work out what Griffin was capable of long-term.

_Always assuming she wants to stick around, of course…_

"You really never flew a dragon before now?" Hiccup asked, deciding now was as good a time as any to get a better feel for Clarke's actual knowledge of dragons.

"Until I found Griffin I thought there weren't any left," Clarke responded, the two dragons adjusting their flights so that their riders could more easily talk. "Like I said, I had to… get away from home for a while… and then I came to the beach and found Griffin near the station."

"Station?"

"That… metal structure," Clarke replied, her tone tentative as though she wasn't sure how best to explain this to him. "My people and I… well, I was basically part of a scout party sent to check out the… land… where you found me and make sure that we could live there, but when the rest of our… fleet… were going to arrive, they ran into trouble and had to split up and landed in different areas."

"And I take it that's the reason that… 'station' looked so battered?" Hiccup asked, recalling the torn metal of the structure in question. He'd only had a chance to briefly take it in, considering that the fight had immediately caught his attention once he saw the dragon being attacked and Clarke's subsequent urgent desire to get away meant that he didn't feel right pressing the issue, but he would have to go back and take a better look at some point; he _really_ wanted to work out how something metal could have ended up in that sort of shape…

"Yeah," Clarke replied. "My best guess is that Griffin found the station a few days before I got there, and… well, something fell onto his wing when he was looking around."

"So you decided to try and help him?" Hiccup looked at her inquiringly, Toothless already flying slower to make it easier for Hiccup to ask his questions. "I'm not saying I think you were wrong, but if Griffin was the first dragon you ever saw… I mean, I knew about them all my life and I had a bit of a panic attack when I first found Toothless, and he was actually tied up when I got there."

"Really?" Clarke said, before she shrugged and continued her story, even as her thoughtful expression made it clear she'd be asking Hiccup for more details later. "Anyway, like I said, my dad was a big fan of dragons when I was growing up and my mom taught me how to treat injuries. There was no way I was going to let a dragon die when I thought it was the only one I'd ever find, and I managed to calm him down enough to convince him to let me examine his wing and treat it."

"Huh," Hiccup said, glancing at the Windstriker's wings to confirm that both seemed in good shape before giving her an approving nod. "Sounds like you did a good job."

"For an amateur?"

"For anyone," Hiccup clarified. "Speaking from experience, it's not easy getting a dragon to trust you out of the blue."

"What do you mean?"

"I was pretty much the first person in Berk to train a dragon, and I had to deal with three centuries of cultural experience telling me that dragons would always go for the kill when I met him. From what you've told me, I take it you at least believed that Griffin wasn't any more dangerous than any other injured animal when you found him?"

"Well, obviously I knew he was _dangerous_ , but… yeah, I never thought he was going to bite my hand off just because he liked eating people," Clarke conceded, looking at her dragon with a slight smile. "Actually, I think Dad told me once that they _can't_ eat people…"

"Really?" Hiccup looked at her in surprise. "Where did he hear that?"

"Just… something my dad read once; maybe it wasn't even true…" Clarke said, waving an awkward hand before her eyes fixed on something up ahead. "Hey; what's that?"

"Our destination," Hiccup said, following Clarke's gaze and smiling at the island ahead of them as the Edge finally came into view. "Dragon's Edge, our own little home."

"Nice," Clarke nodded approvingly at the small outpost in front of her, growing ever closer with each flap of Griffin's wings, before she turned her eyes back to Hiccup. "How many of you are there?"

"Only six of us out here, but we've got a couple of other houses set up for guests," Hiccup explained. "We came here about a year ago to explore the islands in this area, learn a bit more about other dragon species… stuff like that, you know."

"So… you created all this yourself in a year?" Clarke asked, as Toothless fell into a small patrol pattern to give Griffin and Clarke a chance to take a look at the Edge themselves. "Nice job."

"We each set up our own personal huts and a few extra huts for meeting rooms and any guests," the young man explained, before he redirected Toothless's flight path towards the central training area, waving briefly as he saw Astrid and the twins heading for the dome.

"Hiccup?" Astrid looked curiously at him as Toothless came into land next to the dome, closely followed by Griffin's more tentative approach. " _What… who's this_?"

"Clarke and her dragon Griffin," Hiccup replied in trader's tongue, getting off Toothless with practised ease as Clarke made a more awkward descent. "I was making sure the Skrill got somewhere safe, reached a larger land mass, and found Clarke defending the dragon from some people who were trying to kill them both on the coast."

"How many?" Ruffnut asked, following Hiccup's example and speaking in trader's tongue as she looked at Clarke with an eager grin, while the other girl rubbed at her sore legs after she got off her dragon.

"Uh… six," Clarke said, looking uncertainly at the three new faces, one hand still on Griffin's neck for emotional support. "So… who are you?"

"Ruffnut Thorston, and this is my brother Tuff," Ruffnut grinned.

"And _this_ is Chicken!" Tuffnut added, holding up the bird in question with a satisfied grin.

"Chicken," Clarke repeated as she stared at the bird before looking past it at Tuffnut's eager grin. "You named your chicken… 'Chicken'?"

"Keeps it simple," Tuffnut said, still grinning broadly at her.

"Astrid Hofferson," Astrid suddenly stepped in, shaking Clarke's offered hand even as she studied the other girl in an appraising manner. "So how did you meet your dragon?"

"Found him with an injured wing on a coast, treated it, and then… well, Hiccup can tell you the rest," Clarke shrugged as she patted Griffin's neck, giving him a small smile as the dragon snorted in her face. "It's still new, but after seeing… well, now that I know it's possible, I like to think that Griffin and I are hitting it off."

"Nice dragon too," Ruffnut nodded at the other girl before glancing at Hiccup. "What one's this again?"

"Windstriker," Hiccup clarified. "They basically attack with hot air rather than actual fire."

"Seems a bit of a weak point," Tufnut observed.

" _Hey_ ," Clarke glared at the male twin as Griffin let out an accompanying growl. "Don't go dissing my dragon just because he doesn't breathe fire!"

"Yeah, well, Barf and Belch's gas is way cooler than-" Tuffnut began.

"Barf _and_ Belch?" Clarke cut him off, before she looked between the twins with a sudden smile. "Let me guess; you both ride a… Zipplebacks are the two-headed ones that breathe gas and then generate a spark, right?"

"You know that?" Astrid looked at Clarke in surprise.

"My dad was… he was a bit of an amateur scholar when it came to anything dragon-related," Clarke explained. "He always told me stories about them when I was growing up, helping me memorise the quirks of each species, and we always wished that we could see them even if we spent years thinking they were all gone…"

"What happened to him?" Astrid asked, her expression softening as she studied the other blonde, evidently recognising the wistfulness from her own experience missing 'Fearless Finn' after he left Berk.

"He… he died a couple of years ago," Clarke sighed, as Griffin moved over to rub his head against her side in a surprising gesture of comfort. "He… well, the leaders of our people were in trouble, and they objected to my dad wanting to tell everyone about it."

"Huh?" the twins looked curiously at Clarke, and even Astrid and Hiccup looked confused.

"It's a long story," Clarke said. "What's important is that a few months ago, about a year after my dad died, I basically ended up becoming part of an expedition to try and find a safe place for our people to live, but then… well, things happened and I had to get away from the rest of the group."

"Uh… you didn't… get exiled or anything like that, right?" Tuffnut asked.

"Not like that," Clarke smiled reassuringly at Tuffnut before her smile faltered again. "My people have a home, we made some new allies, and I only ever did… I just wanted to save my people, but things…"

She shrugged in a helpless manner that suddenly put Hiccup in mind of the way he had felt when he saw his father take the entire fleet off to the nest.

"We've all been there," he nodded at the mysterious new blonde.

"Anyway," Astrid said, looking thoughtfully at Clarke for a moment before she glanced at Ruffnut, "if you don't have anywhere else to go, and you've got your own dragon now… well, if you need somewhere to stay, we might be able to work it out."

"Really?" Clarke looked at Astrid with a smile. "You want me to stay?"

"If you want to stick around," Hiccup clarified, suddenly feeling a need to elaborate. "I mean, we came out here to explore the islands, but it's not all just going around flying on dragons; if you and Griffin go out there on your own-"

"Someone's trying to hunt dragons, right?" Clarke cut him off.

"How did you know that?" Tuffnut looked sharply at her. "Can you read minds? Can you read his mind? Can you read _my_ mind? What am I-?"

" _I can't read minds_ ," Clarke interrupted Tuffnut, even as she gave him an amused smile before she turned back to Hiccup. "I just realised that you gave the impression that you were surprised to see me defending Griffin when we met but you weren't put off by my attackers, so I'm guessing that you're used to dealing with people who are more interested in hurting them?"

"Oh yeah," Tuffnut nodded.

"I'm in."

"Just like that?" Astrid looked at Clarke in surprise.

"Like I said, my dad loved to tell me stories about dragons when I was a kid," Clarke said, reaching over to place her hand against Griffin's horn. "Now that I know the dragons are still here, if I can do anything to help keep them safe… well, I'm doing it."

"That's… great," Hiccup smiled slightly at Clarke before looking over at the others. "Ruff, could you maybe… show Clarke and Griffin to the stables?"

"On it," Ruffnut said, placing an arm around Clarke's shoulder and leading her towards the stables, Griffin walking behind them.

"Hiccup," Astrid looked at him in a pointed manner after the other two women had walked into the stables. "I thought we had a discussion about just… bringing people to the outpost after Heather?"

"Hey, that worked out pretty well-"

"I meant the first time she came to Berk," Astrid corrected Tuffnut.

"And I got that, Astrid, but I really don't think we have that kind of situation here," Hiccup said. "The people attacking her really weren't dressed like traditional trappers and their tactics were completely random, as though they weren't even sure what Griffin _was_ never mind how to capture him."

"They could have been faking it," Astrid observed.

"Maybe, but it would have been pretty easy for them to stage a situation I'd more easily recognise as a threat; why go to the trouble of pretending to introduce new players to this situation when they could have found someone who'd act like she knew some of it already?" Hiccup pointed out. "And as her story… I mean, I get that people lie, but I also think she raises too many questions if she's a trap."

"Too many questions?" Tuffnut repeated, strangely curious for someone who normally just dived into the situation.

"Like… I don't think she's lied to us about anything, but the way she was talking about how her dad was executed… OK, that's a difficult topic for anyone, but even if I try and take that into account, I'm still not that sure she was telling us the whole truth either."

"And all that stuff about her being part of an expeditionary force for her people," Astrid nodded thoughtfully. "Like you said, she isn't lying, but there's something there that she isn't telling us…"

"So do we ditch her?" Tuffnut asked.

"No," Hiccup shook his head after a moment's thought. "She's already bonded with Griffin, and she's definitely got people after her back where she came from; if we can help her feel comfortable here, maybe we can learn what really happened to her before she came here and give her a chance to go home."

"Spreading the good word, huh?" Astrid smiled at him.

"Is that a bad thing?" Hiccup asked.

"OK," Tuffnut nodded at the two. "I volunteer my place."

"You're already sharing with Ruff; I don't think you're the best qualified to get another roommate."


	6. Beat the Dome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As this plot unfolds, I feel I should clarify a few other timeline-related details. For Hiccup and the rest of Berk, the key details of 'Race to the Edge' have happened up to the Riders' confrontation with the hunters to save the Skrill near the end of the second season. By this I mean that the Riders are living at the Edge, Stoick has Skullcrusher, Astrid has formed Team A back on Berk, Dagur and Heather know they're siblings, and the riders are aware that Heather is only with the Hunters to act as a double agent. However, I'm relocating the events of a few 'stand-alone' episodes (episodes focusing on the Riders dealing with non-hunter-related threats, or at least threats that weren't obviously caused by the hunters) to give Clarke an opportunity to learn more about dragons during a lower-stakes crisis rather than dive straight into a bigger problem.
> 
> There are a few other crucial changes relating to the simple fact that the Riders aren't 'Vikings' in the sense that they don't actually live back in the tenth century, of course, but those will become clear when the time's right.
> 
> Hiccup will encourage the riders to talk in Traders' Tongue for Clarke's benefit until they can teach her more Norse, but for the moment any speech in italics will be in Norse that Clarke can't understand (although she'll have picked up at least the context of a few key words)

"This is _mine_?" Clarke looked at Hiccup with a broad grin as she stared up at the small tower just a short walk from the rest of the outpost.

"Well, it's the best we can offer on short notice, anyway," Hiccup shrugged, awkwardly indicating the building that had been designated as Clarke's temporary lodgings. "We can work on putting something together for you in the Edge itself, but in the meantime we just need to get the cracks filled in and this lookout tower should be… relatively habitable."

"Hey, when you've spent the last several years stuck in a massive structure with just the same people over and over with practically no guarantee of privacy, any kind of place to myself is good," Clarke smiled at Hiccup before turning her attention back to the tower. "So if it's a lookout tower, what should I be looking out for?"

"Just… ships, wild dragons, that kind of thing; it's important, but it's close enough to the Edge that we won't be depending on you while you're working out how to do the job," Hiccup said, before smiling as a thought occurred to him. "On the topic of doing the job, if you want to get a feel for what it's like to train the dragons, you can join us at tomorrow's session."

"Session?" Clarke looked curiously at Hiccup, her grin becoming wider. "As in a _dragon-training_ session?"

"We're doing this… speed test thing the twins came up with a while back," Hiccup shrugged. "Griffin and you might need a bit more time before you can take part in that one yourselves, but there's nothing to stop you both watching and getting a feel for what we do."

"Sounds good," Clarke smiled broadly, looking back at the Edge, just a short distance along the coast, as the twins led Griffin into the large building that was essentially the dragons' 'barn'. "Griffin will be OK there, right?"

"We've had a few other dragons staying there since we got here, and they were pretty much just wild ones; considering that Griffin's already bonded with you, I think it sets a good precedent," Hiccup nodded, before he indicated the tower. "Obviously this is just a lookout tower right now-"

"I spent a while sleeping outside before I found Griffin; I can cope with an uncomfortable room before we can sort something out," Clarke nodded reassuringly at him, before she turned and began to climb up the tower. "See you in the morning!"

When she reached the top of the tower, Clarke turned around to look back at the Edge as Hiccup walked towards his own hut, unable to stop herself from smiling at her good fortune.

She'd left Camp Jaha certain she'd basically condemned herself to living alone to get away from the memories of what she'd done at Mount Weather, and now she'd not only found a completely independent group of humans who could offer her somewhere comfortable to stay away from all memory of the mountain, but had also found the chance to spend time with the creatures she'd heard so much about from her father's stories.

 _And starting tomorrow, I begin to train my own dragon_ …

* * *

Standing in the middle of the Edge, Griffin waiting with the other dragons off to the side while she stood among their riders, Clarke still couldn't stop herself grinning at the way her life had changed so quickly. It seemed like just yesterday she'd believed that she had cut herself off from the rest of the human race with only Griffin for company for the foreseeable future, and now she was part of a group of dragon-training Vikings on their own island outpost.  
  
Granted, that was a weird situation and she _really_ needed to work out why these people were living like stereotypical Vikings where the Grounders had developed a completely new culture, but she wasn't going to complain about cultural quirks when she had so much else to enjoy. She'd only had a brief talk with the others over the morning meal before this training session began, but even with the prospect of actual bread, cheese, and other foods to whet her appetite, her thirst for knowledge was still virtually unquenched…  
  
"There they are!" Astrid called out as the distinctive black form of Toothless emerged from around the cliff, the other blonde holding a small spyglass to her eye.  
  
"Close the dome!" Fishlegs called to the others.  
  
" _And so the drama begins_ ," Ruffnut said, her voice overly dramatic in a manner that put Clarke in mind of Monty and Jasper during those brief moments when being on Earth had just seemed like an adventure before Jasper was hit with that spear.  
  
" _One man, one dragon, one leg, versus one rapidly closing dome_ ," Tuffnut continued as he pushed down the large wooden lever and the leathery dome behind them began to close. Clarke had no idea how they'd designed something like that with Viking-era tools and knowledge, but she had to confess that she was impressed at the scale of the project, considering all the gears and machinery that must have been involved in making it move like that, to say nothing of finding the right spot to make something like this practical in the first place.  
  
" _No way he's making that_ ," Snotlout said as Toothless weaved through the rocky outcrops on the edge of the island before diving into a gap under the cliff, only to emerge from the dome practically the second before it shut.  
  
"Yeah!" Astrid grinned, punching the air in victory.  
  
"What?" Snotlout said incredulously.  
  
"Nice job," Clarke nodded at her new friend as he came into land on top of the dome (she acknowledged that Hiccup was obviously the leader of this group, but she wasn't going to consider if that made him _her_ leader as well until they actually started giving her orders).  
  
"All Toothless, really," Hiccup smiled down at the dragon.  
  
"Alright, we're up," Snotlout said.  
  
"Come on," Fishlegs looked at Snotlout with an amused smile. "Nobody's able to beat the dome except Hiccup."  
  
"Nobody 'til now," Snotlout said confidently.  
  
"Guys," Hiccup protested with an exasperated smile that gave the impression he'd had this discussion before, "this was supposed to be a drill; do we have to turn it into a game?"  
  
"Don't we always?" Astrid countered.  
  
"I actually have to agree with Hiccup there," Clarke pointed out, shrugging as the other five looked at her in surprise. "Turning something into a competition… well, I get the appeal, but you could basically end up making it more important to get more points than the other guy than doing the actual training-"  
  
"Whatever," Snotlout waved his hand dismissively as he led Hookfang away. "Training or a game, it's my turn."  
  
"It's not really worth telling him he's wrong about anything," Astrid observed to Clarke as Snotlout got on the dragon and flew away.  
  
" _I'll wager he loses an eye_ ," Tuffnut said.  
  
" _On the contrary_ ," Ruffnut said with an exaggerated dramatic laugh, " _I predict act one, scene one, will conclude with the loss of a gallbladder_."  
  
"Uh…" Clarke looked uncertainly at the twins, wondering if she'd mentally translated that last word properly. "Did they just-?"  
  
"It's probably better not to get too caught up in trying to understand them," Astrid said, reaching over to pat Clarke's shoulder with a sympathetic smile. "The twins are… odd like that."  
  
"Right," Clarke nodded at Astrid, the twins' tones once again evoking memories of Monty and Jasper back before everything had gone wrong when they'd still been able to joke about everything before they realised just how dangerous the ground really was…  
  
 _Were things really so light-hearted here that they can joke even after… whatever they've seen… or are they just better at coping with it all?_  
  
She pushed such thoughts of her past to the back of her mind as she turned her attention back to waiting for Snotlout to return to the Edge. For the first few moments, she simply sat around with the rest of the group, patiently eyeing the area where Hookfang should emerge once he'd completed the initial lap of the island, privately musing that this was one time when access to TV or cameras would be useful in better assessing Snotlout and Hookfang's progress in their 'race'. Once the larger dragon had emerged, Clarke estimated it had taken a minute or so longer for Hookfang than Toothless to complete that circuit, but it was hardly a sign of anything Snotlout had done wrong when she was fairly sure Night Furies were meant to be the fastest dragons of their size.  
  
" _He hath emerged from the forest_!" Ruffnut yelled, the female twin examining the sight through the eyeglass.  
  
" _And what of his gallbladder_?" Tuffnut asked as he leant against the lever.  
  
" _Impossible to say_ ," Ruffnut observed.  
  
" _The tension continues to build… ah_!" Tuffnut said, leaning on the lever only to fall off it once the dome started moving.  
  
"You're OK," Clarke said as she went over to assess Tuffnut's condition before pulling him back to his feet and turning her attention back to the flying dragon, squinting to keep a better eye as Hookfang weaved around the outer rocks. "Well, he doesn't seem to be doing too badly…"  
  
"And time runs out for our plucky little anti-hero…" Tuffnut said as he scrambled to his feet.  
  
"I love a ticking sundial, don't you?" Ruffnut asked, prompting Clarke to reach for the wrist where she was wearing her father's watch. The watch itself was hidden under her jacket, but she suddenly found herself wondering at the incongruity of how the concept of ticking time had survived when they didn't have the technology to measure it that way.  
  
Turning back to the approaching dragon, Clarke smiled as Hookfang dived towards the cliff under the dome, but her smile faltered when she heard Snotlout screaming about something as he flew. She appreciated that she didn't know any of these people very well yet, but so far Snotlout had struck her as resembling Bellamy or Murphy early in their time on Earth, with the difference that he had at least some legitimate skill to back up his belief in how good he was at whatever he was trying to do…  
  
As the dome slammed shut with dragon and rider still inside it, even the twins winced at the sound of something large crashing inside the contained leather-and-wood structure. Tuffnut quickly pulled the lever back upright to open the dome, which revealed Snotlout lying in the middle of the dome and no sign of the dragon.  
  
"OK," Clarke glanced over at Astrid. "From what Clarke told me about this training exercise, _that's_ not supposed to happen, right?"  
  
"No," Astrid shook her head as Hiccup walked into the dome.  
  
"Snotlout, are you OK?" the one-legged Viking asked.  
  
"Define 'OK'," Snotlout said, sitting up and glaring at his associate.  
  
"Where's Hookfang?"  
  
"That's what I'd like to know," Snotlout said, adjusting his helmet as he stood up. "I've got some words for that dragon!"  
  
"Right…" Clarke nodded uncertainly at Snotlout. "Do you want us to-?"  
  
"No, _I'll_ find him," Snotlout said, glaring at Clarke before he walked off into the forest, the other riders looking silently after him for a moment.  
  
"Should we… help him?" Clarke looked at the others.  
  
"Trust us," Astrid looked at Clarke with a grim smile, "when Snotlout's in this kind of mood, it's best to just leave him alone and let him work out his issues himself."  
  
"Hookfang's probably just working off a bit of steam, and this island isn't that big; Snotlout should be able to find him on his own," Hiccup shrugged dismissively before he looked apologetically at Clarke. "Sorry, but until he gets back, we should probably just focus on more general training; there's no point starting something more complicated if we have to cut it off to help get Hookfang back from wherever he went."  
  
"Fair enough," Clarke nodded in understanding, walking over to stroke Griffin's snout with a smile. "So long as I get to spend more time with this guy, that's the main thing."

* * *

When Snotlout returned with Hookfang what seemed like a couple of hours later, it seemed to Clarke as though everything would easily return to whatever passed for the normal routine on this base. Griffin stayed off to the side when the other riders began dolling out fish for the other dragons, but Clarke could put that down to the idea that he was just getting used to being part of such a diverse group of other dragons rather than him being naturally skittish about them for some reason. Snotlout had returned with Hookfang after only an hour or so spent searching the island, but the Monstrous Nightmare was still sitting separate from the other dragons, as though there was something bothering him.  
  
" _Here, Hookfang_ ," Snotlout said, tossing some fish to the large orange dragon, only for the dragon to throw the fish back in his face after it landed on his nose. " _What; you love mackerel_!"  
  
Clarke hesitated to protest when Snotlout jumped up to grab Hookfang's protruding lower jaw, as though planning to force the dragon to open his mouth and throw the fish in, but whatever plan he had was quickly cut short when the dragon tossed him back towards the rest of the humans, followed by the mackerel.  
  
" _Everyone saw that, right_?" Snotlout asked as he sat up in exasperation.  
  
" _Yes we did, my friend_ ," Tuffnut affirmed with his earlier overly dramatic tone, " _and it was delightful_."  
  
" _Good sir, can you re-enact it for us_?" Ruffnut asked.  
  
" _No, I'm talking about Hookfang_ ," Snotlout protested as he stood up. " _He's acting weird_."  
  
"Uh… what?" Clarke asked.  
  
"Snotlout says that Hookfang's acting weird," Fishlegs clarified.  
  
"In what way?" Clarke asked, as Griffin came up to stand beside her, prompting her to toss him a spare haddock she'd found in the stores even as she looked curiously at the short Viking.  
  
"He didn't listen to me during the race, he ran away, he just spit fish in my face, and threw me against the wall!" Snotlout looked back at Clarke, evidently wanting to ensure everyone understood why he was upset now that he'd been reminded someone here couldn't understand him.  
  
"And… this is weird, how?" Astrid asked.  
  
"You have to admit, Snotlout," Hiccup observed, "that does kind of sum up your relationship with Hookfang."  
  
Glaring sulkily at Hiccup, Snotlout tossed the fish in his hands at Hookfang, only for the dragon to knock it aside with his tail. The rest of the group watched in silence as Hookfang flapped his wings, flew to a position just under a beam on the upper level of the pens, and began banging his head against it.  
  
"So… Hookfang's the problem dragon, right?"  
  
"Huh?" Fishlegs looked curiously at Clarke.  
  
"I mean… well, from what I've seen of the rest of them, Hookfang's the really _difficult_ dragon of this group?" Clarke said, suddenly uncomfortable as she realised how everyone was looking at her when she wasn't even sure what she was saying at the moment herself. "I mean, Griffin's not going to just suddenly start… acting out like that, right?"  
  
"From what I've seen of you and Griffin, I think you'll both be fine," Hiccup smiled at Clarke before looking at Snotlout. "As for Hookfang… well, Snotlout, like Clarke said, Hookfang's always been the difficult one-"  
  
" _Hey_!"  
  
"Don't blame the new girl for pointing out the obvious," Astrid smirked at Snotlout before giving Clarke a more casual smile.  
  
"My _point_ ," Hiccup said, shooting a warning glare at Astrid before he turned back to Snotlout, "is that, if you think there's something wrong with him, you know your dragon best."  
  
"Really?" Snotlout looked at him in surprise.  
  
"Really," Hiccup nodded. "You know what he's like better than any of us, so if you're this concerned about him, lock him up in a pen for tonight just so he doesn't hurt himself, and we can see how he's doing in the morning."  
  
"Yeah," Snotlout nodded as he turned back to the still-head-banging Hookfang. "Yeah, maybe I'll do that."  
  
"And in the meantime," Fishlegs added as he smiled at Clarke, "we can work on giving Clarke and Griffin a crash-course in hand signals?"  
  
"Hand signals?" Clarke looked at the large Viking curiously before her eyes widened in understanding. "You mean for the dragons?"  
  
"Well, if you're sticking around, best you know all the ways to communicate with Griffin here, right?" Fishlegs smiled thoughtfully at her.  
  
"Yeah…" Clarke nodded in agreement as she looked at Griffin, already eager to learn everything she could about how to communicate with her incredible new…  
  
 _Friend_ , she realised suddenly, smiling at him. _I have a dragon for a_ friend…


	7. The Rebellious Nightmare

While Clarke had tried to remember to have some concern for Snotlout and Hookfang after the way he'd been worried about his dragon, it was hard to focus on someone else's individual problems when she was finally in a position where she didn't have to take responsibility for those issues herself. She'd already established a good personal bond with Griffin before she even met Hiccup, which at least meant that she didn't have to worry about any of Hiccup's instructions about how to form a bond in the first place, but picking up the hand signals had taken longer than Clarke had expected. She wasn't sure if it was something about Windstrikers or just the fact that she hadn't taught Griffin that much before Hiccup found them, but it had taken him a while just to understand that 'down' meant 'sit', which meant it had taken a while just to get him to stay still long enough for Hiccup to take measurements for the saddle he was going to make for them.

Still, when she was learning how to train an actual dragon away from her old responsibilities, Clarke almost didn't care how long it took so long as she got to spend time with her new friend. Griffin's right wing was still occasionally stiff, but Toothless had given it a few licks the first time they'd observed that and it seemed to have had a positive effect on the other dragon's condition, which she'd confirmed by taking Griffin out for a short test flight with Astrid and Stormfly. She had wanted to try for a longer flight, but Fishlegs in particular had pointed out that it would be better to ensure that Griffin was comfortable carrying her before trying to do anything too long, so Clarke would get more flying-specific lessons once Hiccup had finished making Griffin's saddle.

Even the second night in the tower hadn't been as difficult as Clarke had partially expected it to be. As she'd already told the Doctor, just having her own place after so long living in the Ark, the dropship, and Camp Jaha, or even sleeping outside, made such a welcome change of pace that Clarke had just wrapped herself up in the offered furs and snuggled in against the wall. She'd been too hyped up about the scale of everything that had happened to her that day to really appreciate it on her first night, but the second time around, with a warm place to sleep and a taste of what she could expect while living on the Edge, it had been far easier for Clarke to let her mind rest and take in everything around her.

Her lesson with Griffin and the other Riders yesterday were still focusing on the basics until Hiccup could finish her saddle, such as how to calm dragons down if they were startled or gaining the trust of an unfamiliar dragon, but every moment she spent with her new friend was an experience she wouldn't trade for anything.

"Hey guys," she smiled as she joined the dragon riders in a clearing where they were preparing the dragons for the day's flying. "All OK?"

"Nothing new to report here, anyway," Astrid affirmed. "You?"

"All seemed quiet up there," Clarke replied, indicating her current 'bedroom'. "Just to check, is it actually likely that we'll be attacked?"

"We had a close call once, but that was only a serious problem because it was just me and Astrid to hold the line after they lured the other guys away and captured Ruff," Tuffnut shrugged. "Haven't seen anything since, but you can't really know, huh?"

"Point," Clarke conceded, privately mourning this confirmation that her new sanctuary wasn't safe, even as she swiftly decided not to worry about it. "Saddle coming along?"

"I still need a bit of time to put it all together, but so long as nothing else comes up-"

"Hookfang's gone!" Snotlout yelled as he ran into the clearing. "He broke out of his pen last night!"

"OK, _that_ doesn't sound normal," Clarke glanced over at Hiccup, while privately acknowledging that her saddle was unlikely to be finished today.

"No," Hiccup conceded, turning away from Clarke to look thoughtfully at Snotlout. "This might be more serious than we thought."

"Great; I accept your offer to help in the search!" Snotlout said as he shoved Hiccup aside and practically leapt onto Toothless's back. "Up, bud. Fly, bud! Do something, bud!"

"I get that I'm new here, but I'm pretty sure you can't just take someone else's dragon like that," Clarke said, noting that Toothless was essentially glaring at the Viking currently perched on his back.

"Look, just calm down, OK, Snotlout," Hiccup said. "We'll help you look for Hookfang."

"Oh yeah you will!" Snotlout leaned over to point in Hiccup's face. "It was your idea to leave him alone in his pen in the first place!"

"Right…" Hiccup shook his head before he turned to look at the other riders. "OK, Astrid and I will take Snotlout to look for Hookfang; the rest of you just… keep giving Clarke a few pointers?"

"Check," the twins nodded at him as Astrid climbed onto Stormfly before flying off after Toothless and his two riders.

"To confirm," Clarke looked over at the remaining members of the group, "that Nightmare's always acted up, right?"

"Oh yeah," Tuffnut smiled as he looked wistfully upwards. "I've lost count of the times I thought he was going to eat Snot…"

"Really?"

"More like Hookfang's just picked Snotlout up in his mouth-" Fishlegs began.

"Which is more than any of _our_ dragons have ever done-"

" _Anyway_ ," Clarke said before Tuffnut could give her more detail than she wanted to know, "not meaning to make it sound like this should be all about me, but I take it Hiccup's not likely to finish my saddle any time soon?"

"Not until he's sure he's done everything he can to help Snotlout with Hookfang," Fishlegs observed.

"Yeah, that's the Hicster for you," Tuffnut smiled. "Guy just can't leave a troubled dragon alone even when he _really_ should, like that time he got abducted by Meatlug-"

"Abducted?" Clarke looked at the large brown dragon that was chewing on a large boulder off to the side. "By _that_?"

"She was attracting metal after she ate a bad combination of rocks and Hiccup's leg got stuck to her; she didn't do it on _purpose_!" Fishlegs protested indignantly, moving over to wrap his arms around Meatlug's head as though trying to shield her ears.

"Right…" Clarke nodded, giving Griffin a brief scratch around where the ears would be on a human head- she didn't see anything that could be explicitly ear-shaped, but maybe there was something around a horn- as she looked around at the other riders. "Why do I get the feeling it's not simple keeping a dragon even after you've trained it?"

"Because we're always learning more," Fishlegs nodded at Clarke before he assumed a more professional expression. "Anyway, getting back to the moment, since your saddle's been delayed, maybe we can work on a few other things…"

* * *

As Clarke flexed her sore shoulders, she reflected that the training she'd endured when working with the grounders had somehow been easier and harder than this at the same time. The Grounders had given her a few basic pointers but not much beyond that, so she'd had less to learn while being pushed further, but while Ruffnut had put her through a more rigorous training program that included a few weapons, the Viking woman was surprisingly more willing to help correct her when she made a mistake, as opposed to the Grounders just waiting for her to realise what she was doing wrong on her own.  
  
"And you do this… all the time?" she asked, panting as she adjusted her grip on her borrowed sword.  
  
"Some of us like it better than others," Ruffnut shrugged from opposite her, adjusting her own grip on her spear as the girls continued to circle each other. "I mean, Fishlegs has the bulk to hold his own, but he's really not got the right _urge_ to do it, Tuff and Hiccup have a good grasp on what they're doing even if they don't always put it into practise, and Snotlout just tends to charge into things when there's a fight."  
  
"Huh," Clarke said, looking at the female twin in surprise.  
  
"What?" Ruffnut shrugged. "I like to keep things simple; that doesn't mean I don't think _at all_." She studied Clarke in an assessing manner for a moment before she shrugged. "Anyway, looking at what you've done so far, I'd put you at probably a bit below where Hiccup was when we started officially training; you've got a better build and some experience of a fight, but you're not that sure what you're doing."  
  
"I… didn't get much training when I was growing up," Clarke shrugged as she raised her sword. "I had a few lessons the last few months after we found land, but there wasn't much time to really work on it… I take it Hiccup had some training?"  
  
"Not sure how much, considering we never saw it happening, but he was definitely taught stuff at _some_ point," Ruffnut nodded, even as she raised her spear in response to Clarke.  
  
"Nice job," another voice suddenly said. "Not where I would have started, but Clarke looks like she's doing well."  
  
"Astrid?" Clarke looked around curiously, her smile broadening when she saw Hiccup and Astrid walking towards them. "When did you get back?"  
  
"Well," Hiccup shrugged as he and Astrid looked at the other two women, "the good news is that we found Hookfang."  
  
"And the bad news?" Clarke asked.  
  
"Depends a bit on how you see it, but Hookfang seems to have found a mate."  
  
"Mate?" Ruffnut and Clarke repeated in surprise.  
  
"Are you saying there's a female Monstrous Nightmare on this island?" Clarke asked, wondering at how many dragons could still exist after this long since the nuclear apocalypse.  
  
"And Hookfang actually attracted her interest," Astrid nodded, her expression displaying a certain incredulity at the idea.  
  
"Well, obviously it's hard to be sure, but Hookfang seemed to be _very_ territorial about spending time with her," Hiccup explained. "I mean, we all know he's always been a bit rougher to Snotlout than any of our dragons would be to us, but this time round Snotlout just started talking to him and Hookfang tossed him away."  
  
"You're sure Snotlout didn't do anything to provoke him?"  
  
"Nothing that I could see," Hiccup nodded. "Trust me, I've seen him getting on Hookfang's nerves in the past often enough; he didn't do anything to make that dragon react that violently this time around."  
  
"Yeah," Astrid confirmed with a grim nod. "I have to admit, I'm… not entirely sure how to feel about the idea that Hookfang's turned like that."  
  
"Yeah," Hiccup nodded, glancing back at his own hut, where Clarke only just now realised Toothless was lying on the roof. "I mean, I've always said we shouldn't forget that dragons are still basically wild animals who choose to stay with us, but I don't think… I mean, when Dad let Thornado go it was because he _had_ to…"  
  
"Thornado?"  
  
"A Thunderdrum the chief started training a few months after we all stopped trying to kill dragons," Ruffnut put in with a slight smile.  
  
"OK, that- _wait a minute_!" Clarke turned to look at Hiccup incredulously as she suddenly registered the implications of Ruffnut's term for Hiccup's father. "Your _father_ is your _chief_?"  
  
"Uh… yeah," Hiccup nodded at Clarke, obviously embarrassed at the revelation. "I mean, it's not that big a deal; it's not like I'm taking over from Dad any time soon…"  
  
"Yeah, but- I mean, your father's the _chief_ …" Clarke began.  
  
"Like Hiccup said, it's not that big a deal," Astrid cut in. "His dad trusts that this is important, and he trusts us to keep an eye on him; Berk can manage without Hiccup there all the time."  
  
"Hey, I'm not judging; I just… well…" Clarke waved a hand at him uncertainly.  
  
"And here I thought we weren't going to have anyone else doing that 'gesture to all of me' thing once I defeated the Red Death," Hiccup smiled slightly at her, shaking his head and continuing to talk before Clarke could ask what he meant with that last comment. "Anyway, my point is that Thornado had to leave because we'd found a trio of baby Thunderdrums that needed Thornado to care for them, and Dad had to explicitly _tell_ him to leave Berk; Hookfang chose to do all this on his own."  
  
"You really think Hookfang's going feral?" Astrid asked.  
  
"Ah, the cruellest of ironies," Ruffnut said melodramatically, before looking uncertainly at Hiccup. "What's 'going feral'?"  
  
"Going back to his basic animal instincts," Clarke clarified, smiling briefly at the female twin's honest curiosity at the new term before turning back to Hiccup. "So where's Snotlout anyway?"  
  
"I think he's going to give it another shot with Hookfang, but like I said, I'm not sure how much of an impact that's going to have on anything," Hiccup said. "I mean, I don't like the idea of any of our dragons ditching us, but like I said, Hookfang's made his choice."  
  
Seeing Hiccup's solemn expression, Clarke made a note to visit Griffin as soon as this training session was over; if dragons could go feral, she wanted to be sure that her new friend appreciated her company.


	8. The Titan Wing

Looking at the three Monstrous Nightmares sitting in the middle of the outpost, Clarke had no idea if what the other Riders were attempting was a good idea or a bad one. She agreed with the others that Snotlout spending the last day or so sulking in his hut wasn't a sustainable situation long-term, but at the same time trying to give him another dragon to replace the dragon he'd spent the last couple of years training didn't strike her as a good idea.

Granted, she was fairly sure that none of the other dragon riders thought it was a brilliant idea either, but they didn't exactly have a lot of other options if they wanted to keep Snotlout as part of the group after Hookfang's apparent regression. After Snotlout had returned to the Edge, he'd spent the rest of the day just sulking in his hut, and while Clarke had thought about trying to talk to him, she didn't feel qualified to even try to help him get over his issues when she was still learning how to bond with Griffin. When the other five riders had left the base, Clarke had decided to focus on giving Griffin a bit of a grooming before returning to her tower for another night's watch, but after receiving the call to the current meeting, Clarke wasn't sure if she should have just stayed away while the more experienced riders sorted this out between them.

"What's this?" Snotlout asked, staring between the three assembled Nightmares behind Hiccup and the twins. Two of the dragons were a vivid shade of green while the third was an interesting turquoise save for a surprisingly pinking snout that put Clarke in mind of a human with a cold.

"We stayed up all night wrangling some new dragons," Hiccup explained. "We figured, maybe with Hookfang going through... well, whatever he's going through, this might help."

"Guys…" Snotlout smiled at the group. "I don't know what to say."

"Thank Thor," Astrid sighed.

"Except that you wasted your time."

"That was abrupt," Clarke observed from her own position leaning on Griffin, who was watching the events in front of them as though he wasn't sure if he should laugh or dismiss everyone as idiots.

"Oh, come on, Snotlout, at least try them out," Hiccup protested.

"As awesome as Hookfire, Fangmaster and Hook Blazefang are- and I named them all already- I can't look at them and not think of Hookfang," Snotlout said, his tone unexpectedly solemn as he indicated the three Nightmares in question.

"Another cruel twist," Tuffnut said in his increasingly familiar overly dramatic voice. "Snotlout rejects the new suitors. Begone, pretenders, and never return! I hast forsookenst thou."

"I _don't_ think that's how-" Clarke began, before the three Nightmares flew away above her head.

"Snotlout," Hiccup cut her off as he walked up to the shorter Viking. "I know you're hurting, but we need you up there with us."

"We can't be down a rider when we're dealing with the hunters," Astrid put in. "I mean, Clarke's good, but she's still learning about dragons, and she didn't exactly sign up for this when she found Griffin-"

"Hey!" Clarke cut the female Viking off. "I'm not going to just ditch you once I know how to get along with Griffin!"

"You're sticking around?" Hiccup looked at her with a smile.

"Well…" Clarke said, taking a moment to consider her impulsive words before she nodded. "I mean, I get that there's a lot more about this situation I need to work out, but-"

"Not important," Snotlout waved his hand dismissively. "This isn't resolving _my_ problems."

"What if you tried riding a different kind of dragon?" Fishlegs asked, before Clarke could respond to that particularly self-centred observation.

"I don't know… maybe?"

"Yeah, there you go," Hiccup smiled encouragingly. "How about a Nadder? Astrid?"

"He doesn't want to ride Stormfly again-" Astrid began.

"Too small, too slow, two heads, not hot enough," Snotlout said, indicating the other four dragons on the field.

"Not hot enough?" Clarke repeated indignantly.

"That dragon has hot air and Hookfang could set _himself_ on fire," Snotlout observed. "It's not exactly a contest."

Clarke chose not to respond to that, instead turning to give Griffin a quick hug, hoping that the dragon either wouldn't understand Snotlout's insult or accept that she didn't care that he couldn't breathe actual fire.

"Right, so these dragons are out, but maybe we try some new ones?" Hiccup asked. "I mean, we can probably find a Thunderdrum or a Timberjack? Or how about-?"

"Listen guys," Snotlout cut him off, "I don't want to come off as _thankful_ or anything, but you taught me a lesson today by offering me your inferior dragons."

"Inferior?" Clarke repeated, feeling indignant on Griffin's behalf even if she doubted the dragon understood that he should be insulted right now.

"OK, what are you saying?" Hiccup asked, stepping forward before the twins could express their own indignation.

"I'm saying that if I can't fly Hookfang, I don't want to fly any dragon."

"You're quitting?" Clarke looked at him in surprise.

"You're good," Snotlout nodded at her in approval before turning to face the rest of the group. "As our new associate has correctly deduced, I am quitting my position. Henceforth, I shall be a dragon rider no more."

"What?" Astrid stared incredulously at him.

"Oh well; easy come, easy go," Tuffnut said as he glanced over at Clarke. "On the bright side, the replacement's a lot hotter than Snot was."

" _Hey_!" Clarke glared at Tuffnut, unsure if she should take that as an insult or a compliment.

"OK, let's not get into that," Hiccup said, walking up to in front of his cousin. "Snotlout, you're just hurting now, that's all; give it some time."

"No, Hiccup, my mind's made up," Snotlout said solemnly. "I'm going to say goodbye to Hookfang, and then… sail back to Berk for good. It's over."

Following the example of the other riders, Clarke simply watched in silence as Snotlout walked away from the outpost and deeper into the island, heading for the area that Hiccup had previously identified as the apparent location of Hookfang's new cave.

"So," Clarke looked over at the others, "just to be sure, you're not _actually_ expecting me to take his place, right?"

"Why not?" Ruff grinned. "Be good to get some more female company here full-time, and-"

"Look, like I said to Astrid, it's not that I wouldn't _like_ to stay, but I can't just… I'm _me_ , OK?" Clarke said. "I like you guys, and maybe I'd stay anyway, but I don't want to feel like I'm just… I don't want to be the girl who got dragged in to fill a slot someone else left open."

"I can get that," Hiccup observed.

"You can?" Fishlegs looked at him in surprise.

"Hey, you think it was easy spending years knowing Dad wanted me to be something else before I met Toothless?" Hiccup observed. "It took until we killed the Red Death for me to stop feeling like he wanted me to be… well, a smarter Snotlout."

"Yeah, _that's_ not a disturbing image at all," Astrid said, looking at Hiccup with a brief warm smile before she looked back at Clarke. "Anyway, Clarke, we're not saying that you have to stay to 'fill Snotlout's spot' or anything like that; if you want to stick around… OK, I'm not saying we wouldn't need some time to adjust to the changes, but we'd still accept you for _you_."

"…Thanks," Clarke smiled slightly at the blonde, deciding to appreciate the sentiment of that statement before she turned back to indicate the direction that Snotlout had walked off in. "Still, I think you should try and talk to him one more time; maybe if we can work out what made Hookfang act up like this we can get them to patch things up?"

"It's worth a shot, anyway," Fishlegs said, looking curiously between Clarke and Griffin. "Still… could you just… stay here?"

"What?"

"It's nothing personal, but if Hookfang starts acting up… well, we'd prefer to have had a bit more time training with Griffin before we start going into action with him," Fishlegs shrugged. "We only really managed to get these guys working together the first time we went flying as a group because we were dealing with one big target in an open space; if Hookfang tries anything…"

"You don't want to have to worry about Griffin getting in the way when you're all flying around?" Clarke nodded in understanding. "That's… fair."

A part of her resented this turn of events, as though the earlier attempt at solidarity had just been for show, but she could understand the reasoning behind it. If fighter pilots back in the old days had needed training to work together when they were all flying the same planes, how much harder would it be to coordinate a group of dragons with different skills and their own minds and instincts to take into account?

As the others got back onto their dragons and flew away, Clarke smiled as she affectionately rubbed Griffin's nose under his large front horn.

"Sorry you can't go with them right now," she said, smiling as the dragon gave a soft rumble in response as though assuring her he understood. "Still, as long as we're here… I know the saddle isn't ready for anything longer yet, but shall we just take a quick flight?"

Griffin let out another rumble in response as he bent his head slightly, allowing Clarke to climb onto his neck and take up her old position where the dragon's neck joined his body. She took hold of the fin in front of her, lightly squeezed her heels against Griffin's side, and allowed herself a brief whoop of joy as she took off into the air, grinning as the wind hit her face and Griffin let out a joyful roar of his own.

For a moment the sea was spread out before her, glistening in the sunlight, but then Griffin adjusted his flight so that he was heading back towards the island, only to spin again so that he was flying along the island's coastline. Clarke briefly thought about taking the dragon further inland to find the others, but talked herself out of that before the thought could do more than cross her mind. She didn't like being sidelined, but the other riders had at least had a valid reason for that beyond treating her like she was still a kid even after she'd been forced to prove otherwise.

 _I just need more experience here_ …

She was just completing her initial circuit of the island when she saw Hookfang flying through the air over the forest with Snotlout on his back. Clarke smiled hopefully at the sight, but the smile faded when a larger Monstrous Nightmare emerged from the woods behind Hookfang, this dragon a deep shade of red that made Clarke think of blood.

"What the-?" she began, flying towards the other rider.

"Stay back Clarke!" Snotlout yelled, urgently waving Clarke back with one hand as he continued flying. "We have to stop this ourselves!"

"You don't have to-"

"It's a dragon thing!" Snotlout yelled, urgently indicating the dragon behind them. "We have to stop this sucker on our own, or Girl Hookfang's eggs get smashed!"

" _Eggs_?"

"Just _stay back_!" Snotlout yelled, Hookfang reinforcing his master's words with a roar. As though the roar had been a cue, Griffin pulled back, leaving the two Nightmares to continue their aerial chase as Clarke and her dragon returned to the Edge. As she approached, Clarke was relieved to see that at least most of the other riders had already arrived back ahead of her; at least she knew there was probably some dragon-related reason to Snotlout dealing with this himself rather than just him being the last one standing.

"What's going on?" she asked as she came into land. "I was just out for a flight, and then Snotlout and Hookfang came back with another Nightmare-"

"It's a Titan Nightmare, and we'll explain everything once it's been dealt with," Hiccup explained, looking up anxiously as Snotlout and Hookfang flew into view with the other dragon behind them. "Star the dome now!"

As the twins slammed the control lever down, the dome began to close once more. Confused, Clarke could only join the other riders as they watched Snotlout and Hookfang race towards the lower cave that led into the dome, followed by a faint tremor from below before the dome slammed shut, both dragons and Snotlout still inside it.

"They didn't make it!" Astrid yelled, slamming her hand against the dome in frustration. Clarke was about to say something when she heard a loud roar from inside the dome, followed by the vague sound of Snotlout's voice and sudden small bursts of flame emerging from the stitches in the dome.

"Hookfang's using the Titan Wing's size against him!" Hiccup said in understanding.

"He's trying to wear it down," Astrid added.

"Oh…" Clarke nodded in tentative understanding as she looked at the dome again. It was hard to be certain when she hadn't seen the Titan Wing up close yet, but based on Hookfang's size, he could probably manoeuvre around the interior of the dome and attack the other dragon at different angles while the Titan Wing was just too big to manoeuvre properly…

After a series of roars and a few more bursts of flame, the dome interior fell silent until Snotlout called out to them to open it up again. After the twins had returned the lever to its upright position, the dome opened to reveal Snotlout and Hookfang standing on top of their opponent, the large red dragon that was nearly twice Hookfang's size letting out a final roar before it slumped to the ground.

"Now _that's_ what I call domination!" Snotlout said, his arms folded as he sat up straight behind Hookfang's head. "Boom! You tell him, Fangster!"

"I take it this is good?" Clarke asked, only for her question to answer itself as Hookfang stepped off the downed Titan Wing, which looked forlornly back at Hookfang and then flew off into the distance, clearly travelling away from Dragon's Edge.

" _Superb_ ," Tuffnut nodded.

"What was?" Clarke looked back at him before turning to Hiccup and Astrid. "What _exactly_ just happened here?"

"We got to the cave where Snotlout had left Hookfang, and it turned out that Hookfang was actually there to try and protect the female from a Titan Wing Monstrous Nightmare who seems to want to destroy her eggs," Hiccup explained.

"The one that Hookfang just fought?"

"That Hookfang _and Snotlout_ just fought, thank you," Snotlout cut in. "Girl Hookfang was probably the mate of another Titan Wing and this one wanted to destroy its rival's eggs; Hookie here was just responding to a call for help.

"Huh," Clarke smiled as she looked at the dome in understanding. "So Hookfang beating that dragon was just his way of protecting the eggs?"

"Pretty much," Hiccup nodded. "He had to establish dominance over the Titan Wing so the other dragon would leave the eggs alone."

"And that's why I couldn't interfere when we passed each other?"

"Bingo," Snotlout nodded at her. "If Hookfang didn't beat the guy himself, Girl Hookfang would probably have had her eggs destroyed."

"OK, so with the eggs safe… what happens now?" Clarke asked, shrugging curiously as she indicated the returned Monstrous Nightmare. "I mean, does this mean Hookfang's their new… dad figure?"

" _Hey_!" Snotlout protested.

"No, from what we've seen of nesting dragons, this is probably just her safe place for the moment rather than her new home," Hiccup put in. "Once the eggs are hatched, she should be able to fly them somewhere safe until they're big enough to look after themselves."

He smiled as another thought came to him and he looked around the group. "And speaking of them hatching, now that the danger's over, shall we go back and see how those eggs are doing?"

"Sounds good to me!" Clarke grinned, already swinging her leg over Griffin's neck.

One of her new friends wasn't leaving (even if she found Snotlout a little bit annoying), and now she was about to see dragon eggs; what could be better?


	9. Plans for Clarke

Sitting in the main meeting area with the familiar team of Riders, Hiccup pondered the events of the day.

It may not have seen them make much progress in their campaign against the hunters, but he felt satisfied that they'd made a difference in their own small area of the Archipelago. The Titan Wing Nightmare had been driven off, Girl Hookfang (Gods, he wished someone had come up with a better name than that) had hatched her eggs, and Snotlout and Hookfang were back together. They were going to need to give Girl Hookfang a few days with her babies before she took them somewhere else, but it didn't seem like any of their dragons were going to have trouble accepting her presence for the moment, and she in turn seemed to appreciate them easily enough so long as they didn't come too close to her nest.

Frankly, what impressed Hiccup most at this point was how well Clarke had coped with everything. Admittedly, all she'd done was go for a quick flight before the rest of them showed up, but once she'd established what was going on she'd backed off to let them handle things on their own rather than trying to step in and impose her own view on the situation. She had a strength of character and focus that put him in mind of Astrid and the other female Riders, but at the same time she wasn't arrogant enough to try and force her views on a situation until she knew the full picture, and also recognised the potential limits of her knowledge.

He still had a few questions behind where she had come from or exactly what had driven her away from her people, but so far he had no reason to believe that she was here to harm them. He'd sent Fishlegs to discreetly check up on her while she was in the tower- Meatlug might be slow, but she could be surprisingly quiet so long as she had an open space to fly in- and Clarke genuinely seemed to be focusing on her assigned task, which at least gave Hiccup some assurance that her interest in helping them was real.

"So," Astrid looked over at Hiccup with a curious stare/smile as they settled into position, "is there a reason Clarke's out there and not in here?"

"She volunteered for watch duty when I suggested we talk about the day's events first-"

"And we've had all six of us here rather than leave anyone on watch when it was _only_ six of us on this island; I repeat, why isn't she here?"

"I can fill that in," Tuffnut raised one hand with his usual bored nonchalance when discussing a topic he thought should be obvious. "We still haven't decided if we're even going to _let_ Clarke stick around."

"Why shouldn't we?" Fishlegs looked at the male twin in surprise.

"The fact that she's _not_ one of us?"

"Excuse me?" Astrid looked at Tuffnut with a pointed expression. "You're going to use that when _you_ were the one nominating her to take Snotlout's place just yesterday-?"

"Hey, I was just going with the flow; I wasn't expecting anyone to take me _seriously_!" Tuffnut cut in, raising his hands defensively. "I mean, I'm not saying Clarke seems like a bad person, , and Griffin's kinda cool as non-Zippleback dragons go, but none of us just _got_ to be part of this team, OK? We spent the last few years protecting Berk and fighting the nastiest, smelliest, most disgusting and often insane dragons out there; how many times have we almost gotten killed doing it?"

"And that rules Clarke out because…?"

"Well, why should she just get to waltz in here and join us like that?" Tuffnut continued. "I mean, we never even let Gustav join and that kid spent years training for the job once he found Fanghook; this girl just stumbled across a Windstriker, tried to fight off a few hunters, and we're bending over to give her-?"

"OK, I'll stop you right there," Hiccup cut Tuffnut off. "We're not 'bending over' to give her anything. I found someone who was trying to protect an injured dragon, helped her fight off its attackers, and offered to give her somewhere she could rest and learn more about dragons after she made it clear she wasn't dangerous."

"And you can't compare her to Gustav," Astrid cut in. "I get that he's not a bad person, but everything he did was about showing that he could be part of the group without thinking about the dangers of it; Clarke's priority so far has always just been protecting Griffin, and today's events at least suggest that she's willing to do that for other dragons."

"Exactly," Hiccup nodded. "I get that we haven't had anything big to really test her since she came to the Edge, but keep in mind that she recognises enough about the situation here to realise when she should stay out of something rather than trying to butt in when she could make some ignorant mistake."

"She _is_ a lot more cautious than half of us, certainly," Astrid smiled even as she shot the twins and Snotlout a particular stare at that comment.

"And I'm not saying that automatically qualifies her to become part of the group, but it's an important character trait we can't overlook, anyway," Hiccup continued. "I agree with Tuffnut's basic point that we shouldn't tell her all about the Dragon Eye right away, and I think we should give her a little more time to be sure we can trust her with anything bigger than watch duty, but… well, it can't hurt to see what she has to offer, and at the very least we can make sure that she knows how to take care of Griffin before she decides to move on."

"Hiccup's right," Astrid nodded.

"Big surprise…" Snotlout grumbled.

"I agree," Fishlegs added.

"Eh… can't fault that plan, I guess," Ruffnut observed. "Give her a bit more detail without telling her anything that might work against us if she decides to go nuts or pull a Heather… so long as we give her a few chances to prove herself without forcing her to do anything she wasn't going to do anyway, and it could work."

"Right…" Hiccup nodded thoughtfully for a moment before he came to a decision. "Ruff, Tuff, you'll be responsible for keeping an eye on her for the next few days."

"Us?" the twins said simultaneously.

"You're both fairly good with how to train dragons and any hand-to-hand instruction she might need when you apply yourselves, but if we have to leave the island for a while… well, to be blunt, right now we're doing better with hit-and-run tactics against the hunters, and that's not quite one of Barf and Belch's strengths."

" _Hey_!" the twins objected.

"No, he's right," Astrid nodded. "We're all qualified flyers by now, so there's no risk of you getting rusty if you stay behind for a while, but Zipplebacks are best when our main goal is to cause a lot of damage. When we're trying to rescue dragons as our primary objective, it might be best if we're not indiscriminately gassing our targets and blowing up boats."

"You _really_ like taking the fun out of it, don't you?" Ruffnut glared at Hiccup.

"Just being practical," Hiccup responded. "If we encounter a big enough base within the week, I'll be sure to let you both know and Fishlegs can take over as Clarke's observer, but that same raw power means that you're the better choice to keep an eye on her if she turns out to be planning on tricking us later."

He sat back in his chair and looked thoughtfully around the group. "That said, there _is_ something I think we should ask her about before we make a final decision one way or the other…"

* * *

As the riders flew back towards the coast, Clarke wondered if what she was about to do was the best move. When Hiccup had asked about the possibility of them going back to Arrow Station to salvage some of the metal for their own use, it had been a refreshing change to realise that he was legitimately just asking for the metal rather than making it a condition of her staying on the Edge. She was fairly sure that there was no active technology left in the station that anyone here would be able to adapt, so she didn't have to worry about giving anyone something they could set off by accident, but she still wasn't sure how much of her real past she should or even could actually share with her new friends.  
  
 _I mean, the Grounders attacked us at first because they thought we came from Mount Weather, and then the Mountain attacked us because they'd spent decades thinking of themselves as being better than everyone else; how will Berk react to seeing the Station?_  
  
She'd heard nothing to indicate that these people knew the full nature of the world they lived in so far, but at the same time it was hard to be sure if that was because they just didn't know Earth's real history or if they just hadn't had a reason to talk about it. There were so many details about daily life back on the Ark or in the Coalition that nobody would have mentioned to anyone on the other side because they just didn't think about it, so why would any of these apparent Vikings have reason to tell her about the… the rain of fire that had remade the world a century ago or something like that?  
  
God, from what she remembered of her father's stories about how the Dragon Sanctuary had been designed to give people a vast role-playing experience, it was possible that these people didn't even know about the world that had been before. After the bombs fell, assuming that the Dragon Sanctuary had come through mostly intact, maybe any survivors of the bombs had just started relying on what resources were available rather than trying to rebuild to the level of technology they'd had before? From what she could remember, the Sanctuary had been set up as though it was dragons and Vikings living together; maybe the Sanctuary's last guests had just reached a point where they believed everything around them had been records of a real history?  
  
 _OK, so I'm fairly sure the original Vikings couldn't create something like that dome or Hiccup's fake leg, but there's still nothing to indicate that they started out with anything more advanced than that…_  
  
"You OK?"  
  
"Fine," Clarke looked back at Fishlegs with a reassuring smile as the larger teen flew into position alongside her and Griffin. She'd managed to work out a basic plan to go along with Hiccup's request that relied on most of the dragons to collect what the young Viking was after, Clarke only revealing that she had an idea and asking that Astrid stay behind to guard the Edge, but she still needed to actually get to Arrow Station and confirm that her idea would work.  
  
"I'm just…" she said, briefly trying to justify her silence before deciding to give him part of the truth. "Well, this is only my second major flight, you know."  
  
"Yeah, it's an impressive experience, isn't it?" Fishlegs grinned as Meatlug and Griffin exchanged brief growls. "I mean, I didn't have much time to enjoy it the first time because we were worried about our parents, but all of our later flights… well, they may say Meatlug's a slow flyer, but she's always been fast enough for me."  
  
"Hey, we all look for something different in life," Clarke nodded in understanding. "I get that Griffin doesn't have the firepower of some of the other dragons, but he's dedicated and friendly; that's what's matters to me."  
  
"Yeah, I think we all feel that way about our dragons really," Fishlegs shrugged, reaching over to scratch behind Meatlug's ears. "Hiccup's never made a big thing about the fact that Toothless is higher in stats than most of our other dragons, Astrid tends to focus on praising Stormfly's look and friendliness than talking about things like her firepower or her spikes…"  
  
As Fishlegs kept talking, a part of Clarke's mind continued to pay attention to his words, but the rest of her was thinking about everything she was learning about this new society. She still wasn't sure if she was ready to sign up for whatever was going on at the Edge on a full-time basis, but so far her time with the six dragon-riding Vikings was the first time she felt genuinely happy since she reached the ground. The rest of the Ark was down, her surviving people had managed to establish a defensible position with access to good resources, there was no active conflict between the Ark and the Coalition the last she'd heard, and she was learning more about the creatures she'd heard stories about ever since she was a little girl.  
  
Granted, the fact that the Edge had a watch tower at least suggested they had some kind of enemy they had to worry about, but this far out it was unlikely that any enemies _Clarke_ might have had to deal with back on the continent would know anything about what she'd done, so at least she wasn't likely to have to face anyone trying to kill her for destroying Mount Weather or anything like that.  
  
 _I'm not ready to switch tribes completely yet, but I definitely like what I've found so far_ …  
  
"We're coming in!" Hiccup called out. Looking up ahead, Clarke nodded to herself as she saw the coastline just ahead- she had no idea how Hiccup managed to navigate like that, but he knew where he was going- and gave Griffin's sides a brief squeeze with her heels to encourage him to pick up the pace. Looking up ahead, she was surprised to see that Arrow Station was actually on a promontory (or whatever the term was for a bit of land that stuck out from the main continent), with the main continent hidden in the distance, but on reflection she conceded that it made sense. Assuming that Hiccup hadn't been flying too high when he first found her, he could easily have missed the signs that he had found a larger continent and assumed that they were just on another island, and the area was wide enough that she hadn't registered it herself when she was looking for the ocean from inland.  
  
Viewing Arrow Station from this angle, Clarke was impressed at the quality of the original station design. Considering that it had come through the atmosphere and been subjected to whatever force had been necessary to separate it from the rest of the Ark, the station's main body was mostly intact, apart from the slight holes where the pylons and other attachments had been torn off during the descent before it hit that cliff and basically 'skidded' to a halt. Clarke took a moment to look around for any sign of the dome as she drew in closer, but she could only assume that it had been lost during an earlier stage of the descent, and she didn't want to think about what might have happened to anyone who'd been in that area when they'd crashed.  
  
 _I couldn't have saved anybody unless I'd been here the moment it crashed; at least this way someone can get some use out of its remains…_  
  
"This is a ship?" Snotlout looked at the station's remains in confusion.  
  
"Yeah, that surprised me too," Hiccup observed, glancing over at Clarke. "How does that… well, work?"  
  
"It's… complicated," Clarke shrugged.  
  
"You don't know how your ship works?" Snotlout looked at her with a smirk. "Bit stupid, isn't it?"  
  
"Really?" Clarke responded, looking back at him with her own slight smirk. "Do you know how Toothless's tailfin works?"  
  
"Duh; Hiccup adjusts it with his foot-"  
  
"But how does it _do_ that?" Clarke cut Snotlout off. "I mean, can you explain to me in depth how Hiccup moving his foot this way or that controls how Toothless's tail catches the air and lets him fly?"  
  
"Well… it just… I mean… he made it so…" Snotlout shook his head and folded his arms in a sulk. "Shut up, Clarke."  
  
"My point exactly," Clarke nodded at the shortest male Viking, allowing herself an indulgent smile. "Just because you live near something every day doesn't mean you know everything about how it works. I could maybe demonstrate how to use a few things inside the Station if they hadn't been damaged in the crash, but just like you can't explain Toothless's tailfin, I don't know enough about our equipment to repair any of it for you."  
  
"Well, we're not here to pick up anything complicated," Hiccup put in, as the dragons flew down to land beside the battered and burnt remains of Arrow station. As the other riders got off their dragons, Hiccup walked up to rap his knuckles against the hull in an experimental manner. "It's taken a few knocks, but it looks like the metal could still be useful… you're sure this wasn't a dragon attack?"  
  
"Well… maybe it was; like I said, I was in a different ship that landed somewhere else, so I'm not sure what happened here," Clarke said; assuming that dragons could reach a sufficient temperature, dragonfire was probably a suitable substitute explanation for the damage the station had sustained during re-entry.  
  
"Maybe…" Fishlegs looked thoughtfully at the twisted hull as Meatlug sniffed at it. "We obviously can't take this _all_ with us, but maybe we can break off a few pieces as a test run, and then… isn't Gobber coming over soon?"  
  
"Gobber?" Clarke repeated curiously.  
  
"Berk's blacksmith, and basically our village's second after the chief," Astrid explained. "Hiccup was his apprentice back on Berk, and Gobber still likes to stop by and see how we're doing when he has the time."  
  
"And like Fishlegs said, he's meant to be stopping by in a couple of days, so we can see if he's got any ideas about how we could work this metal into something," Hiccup explained, studying the damaged hull himself. "I mean, I can think of a few possibilities right now, but I'd like a second opinion before I do anything that costs us too much of our supplies…"  
  
"But how do we get this metal anywhere?" Ruffnut asked. "I mean we're not going to carry something _that_ big back to the Edge even with our dragons…"  
  
"But we do have a few ways we could break it down into smaller parts," Clarke pointed out. "I mean, obviously I'm taking a few guesses about what each of your dragons are specifically capable of at their peaks, and we'd need to be careful when setting anything off, but if we can pick out a few weak points in the metal… well, I have some ideas."  
  
"Sounds… promising," Hiccup nodded thoughtfully, before he walked over to whisper discreetly to Clarke. "Although if you wanted to melt metal, Nadders are hotter than Nightmares…"  
  
"Yeah, I thought so," Clarke nodded, smiling in understanding at Hiccup. "I just thought that we'd need numbers, and it seemed better to leave Astrid to keep an eye on things at the Edge than Snotlout."  
  
"…Good point," Hiccup conceded, before he turned back to the group. "OK, Clarke gave us a game plan; let's do this."  
  
As the dragons set to work, Clarke smiled at this new proof that she was in the right place; where the 100 had fought her most of the way until they had to, and the Coalition had never truly trusted her, but she and the Riders had given each other their trust and so far neither showed any sign that they were planning any kind of betrayal.  
  
Giving them the metal from Arrow Station wouldn't give them anything more than new metal that they could use for weapons, but when dealing with a tribe of warriors, material for new weapons couldn't be a bad thing, and it would show them that she was willing to contribute. She couldn't do much with Griffin considering that he only 'breathed' hot air rather than any kind of fire, but she could coordinate the other Riders as Hookfang and Toothless made a few precise strikes to weaken the station's hull near a few of the larger cracks caused by the original crash. Once the metal had been worn down, the humans and the other dragons moved to a safe distance before Barf and Belch breathed a large quantity of gas into the ship and triggered it, setting off an explosion that shattered the hull even further. As the other dragons and the humans collected the resulting shrapnel, Meatlug helped them pull off some of the more stubborn parts of the metal away from the main body of the station.  
  
By the time the sun had begun to set, they had gathered a range of metal of varying shapes and sizes, with Hiccup sorting those portions according to the size, apparent quality, and what he thought he might be able to use it for. They even assembled a few branches and vines into makeshift 'bags' that they could use to carry everything back, with Hookfang and Barf and Belch carrying one lot of the metal while Meatlug and Griffin took the rest, leaving Hiccup and Toothless to lead the way back to the Edge.  
  
Looking down at the material she'd managed to bring together for her new allies, Clarke felt a renewed sense of satisfaction at the contribution she'd made to her latest home. She wasn't entirely sure what the dragon riders had to deal with that might require them to defend themselves, but with all this metal available, and based on what she'd seen of Hiccup's inventive skill, she had faith that he'd be able to make something useful.  
  
 _Actually, it might be interesting to see how dragons affect the melding process here…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A straightforward chapter, but it's important to give Clarke time to establish herself as an ally; next up, Clarke will meet Gobber before one of my favourite stand-alone eps of the series…


	10. Training Wanheda

Standing in the middle of the training field, Clarke was genuinely looking forward to this new training session. Even when she'd become closer to Lexa during her peoples' brief alliance with the Grounders, she'd never been entirely sure how serious the other warriors there were taking her request to learn more about hand-to-hand combat. She hadn't dared to bring it up to any of them in case it weakened her position, but she'd wondered if the fact that she had already managed to take out several of the Coalitions' warriors had caused them to overestimate her existing abilities. By contrast, since they'd resumed her training sessions after their temporary excursion to Arrow Station, Astrid and Ruffnut had shown no sign that they had any existing expectations of what she was capable of. With no preconceived ideas about how she could hold her own already, the two young women had given her more detailed instructions during their lessons than any of her lessons back among the Grounders, which had the extra advantage of giving Clarke herself a better sense of what she'd been capable of even before she came down to the ground.

She would have still preferred to spend more time training with Griffin, but she appreciated the importance of learning how to fight on her own, and it wasn't as though the dragon was far away. Griffin was currently sitting on the edge of the training field with Stormfly, the two dragons watching their humans spar with what Clarke was tempted to consider idle curiosity; Tuffnut was apparently off feeding Barf and Belch.

"You're going to want to adjust your grip on that," Astrid said, indicating the sword in Clarke's hands as the other blonde raised her axe after their last brief clash of weapons. "Like I said at the start, you can't enter every fight expecting to be up against other sword-users; you need to be ready to adjust for anything you get thrown at you."

Nodding in acknowledgement, Clarke waited for a moment before Astrid charged at her, waiting until the other blonde came in close to try and get her sword under the blade of the axe. Clarke's goal was to try and force the axe out of Astrid's hand, but the plan backfired when Astrid shifted her grip on the axe so that Clarke's sword passed over the blade rather than getting caught under it, followed by Astrid hitting her in the side of the head with the axe.

"And that's what I'm talking about," Astrid said, nodding at her opponent as Clarke winced and clutched at the side of her head. "You have good ideas about how to use your weapons, but you need experience to properly put them into action."

"Well," Clarke smiled tentatively at the blonde Viking warrior, "I guess that's what I'm here for."

"And you also need to remember that you can't always rely on the dragon," Ruffnut put in from the side. "I mean, Barf's great, but I can't always depend on being able to blow stuff up in case Tuff's not there or Belch is having a bad day."

"That's possible?" Clarke looked curiously at the female twin. "For Belch to… have a bad day, I mean?"

"Wet dragon heads can't light their fire, and we've never been able to establish how long it would take a Zippleback to dry off after they're soaked," Astrid put in. "I mean, Toothless was able to fire plasma blasts just a couple of minutes after he'd been dunked underwater for a minute or two, but he had to do a bit of fast flying to dry off before he started shooting again, and we obviously can't be sure we'll all have that kind of opportunity in a dangerous situation even if the other dragons could fly that fast."

"One of the reasons new weapons are always a good thing," Ruffnut added with a satisfied grin as she indicated Hiccup's hut, smoke rising from the front door and roof to indicate that he was working on his own forge. "We didn't exactly focus on it back in the day, but that guy's been great in the forge even before he got the Night Fury; Gobber might be the best, but Hiccup should be able to come up with _something_ at the moment."

"Exactly," Astrid smiled, twirling her axe as she looked at Clarke. "And on the topic of forging things, you're sure you're OK with a sword as your weapon?"

"Well, when I'm still learning how to fight like this, I'd prefer something… well, adaptable," Clarke shrugged. "I mean, the axe has great offensive opportunities, and the spear's useful for keeping your opponents back, but I just feel a bit more comfortable with swords for their variety."

"That fits," Astrid nodded (Clarke was just relieved that she hadn't unintentionally offended Astrid by implying that her favourite weapon was limited; the other girl clearly knew how to defend herself with an axe, but Clarke just wanted more experience with a more standard weapon).

"You really didn't do much fighting before?" Ruffnut looked at Clarke in surprise.

"My tribe… we were fairly isolated," Clarke shrugged, hoping this story would work; the more she spent time with these people, the clearer it was that they had even less knowledge of their true history than the Coalition. "We were basically… we pretty much lived on a ship before we found land, growing everything we needed on board and rarely settling down anywhere; we probably wouldn't have landed here if it wasn't for the fact that the ship was starting to fall apart on its own."

"You mean it was damaged before it ran aground like that?" Astrid asked, resting her axe over her shoulder as she and Ruffnut looked at the other blonde.

"Basically," Clarke nodded. "It wasn't actually… sinking before I was sent away, but certain parts… well, my father was one of the people in charge of keeping it all together, and he'd worked out that it couldn't keep going for much longer before it would… sink… no matter what he did."

"That was… the trouble you mentioned, right?" Astrid looked at her with a new sense of sympathy in her manner. "Your chief had him killed to keep the secret?"

"Yeah," Clarke nodded.

"Bit stupid, isn't it?" Ruffnut put in as she rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I mean, a guy tells you that there's a problem with your ship, which it's actually his damn _job_ to keep in order, and your chief's response is to kill him to keep it quiet rather than let him try to fix it?"

"They… weren't sure if there was any way to fix it, so they were basically hoping that they could keep it quiet from the rest of my… tribe… until they worked something else out," Clarke explained, shaking her head.

"That was dumb."

"And when the twins think something's stupid, you _know_ it's stupid," Astrid observed, looking at Clarke with new sympathy. "Your mother didn't… she was a healer, right?"

"Yeah," Clarke nodded. "It was… well, she did her best to help anyone who got caught in that mess, but everything just kept getting worse, until they all decided that there wasn't anything they could do to fix the ship apart from find somewhere safe to land."

"Which was-?" Astrid began, before a small orange-black dragon landed on the ground between the three girls, a leather satchel on its side.

"Huh?" Clarke looked at the small dragon, about the side of a cat and far smaller than any dragon she'd seen so far. "What's that?"

"Terrible Terror," Astrid said, walking over to open the satchel and take out a small piece of parchment.

"And they're… always that small?" Clarke asked, as the small dragon sat on the ground and licked its own eyeball. She vaguely recalled reading about dragons this size in the pamphlet, but the idea that any dragons had been created at this tiny size felt strange.

"Never encountered anything bigger, anyway," Ruffnut confirmed, before she looked curiously at Astrid. "Is it from-?"

"It is," Astrid cut the other girl off, reading over the parchment for a few moments before she looked back at Ruffnut and Clarke. "OK, I'll let Hiccup know about the message and then Snotlout and Fishlegs can join me on this one; you two are staying here, and I'll let Tuffnut know when I see him."

"What-?" Clarke began, only for Astrid to get on Stormfly's back and fly off towards the main houses, leaving Clarke to look at Ruffnut in confusion.

"We've… got a few long-standing problems we're dealing with around this area," Ruffnut explained, shifting her stance awkwardly as though she wasn't entirely sure how to explain things to Clarke. "Hiccup thought it'd be better if you didn't get dragged into anything too big while you're still learning or before you've made your choice about sticking around, so… well, Hiccup's got all that metal to work with right now, and Tuffnut and I were told to keep an eye on you while everyone else keeps up with other things."

"I… see," Clarke said, giving a tentative nod of understanding. "I take it these… problems are why you have guard-towers in the first place?"

"We're being cautious," Ruffnut confirmed, before she shot a warning glare at Clarke. "And tell Hiccup I'm taking things that seriously and I'll _really_ get rough on you."

"Got a reputation to keep up, huh?" Clarke smiled thoughtfully at Ruffnut.

"That works," Ruffnut nodded, stepping back to give Clarke a grateful smile. "So how do you want to keep this up?"

* * *

Sword in her hands, Clarke tensed as she faced the two strange Viking twins as they prepared to attack her. While Hiccup had chosen to stay behind to work on the metal salvaged from Arrow Station, Astrid had soon gathered Snotlout and Fishlegs to deal with whatever mission she had received a message about. That left Clarke to resume her training with Ruffnut, and Tuffnut had soon joined his sister in the training session, albeit claiming that it was because he just didn't have anything else to do at the moment.  
  
It had been an erratic training session, with Clarke alternating between facing one twin or the other, mixed in with the occasional match against both of them, but she liked to think she'd been making a good impression of herself. She'd tested herself on using a bow and arrow just to see how she handled those weapons, but had accepted the observation that arrows weren't really a practical weapon when she'd be on a dragon when fighting at long range, so had tested herself with a few other melee weapons. Maces and other blunt objects weren't her favourite as they felt like they were weighing her down too much, but she could appreciate the value of axes and spears for a forceful attack and keeping enemies at a distance, even if she'd settled on the sword as her main weapon. She'd spent the last few practise bouts getting a good feel for the weapon, and now she was circling the twins in the training area, the two blond Vikings ready with their spears as both sides waited for the right moment to attack-  
  
As Tuffnut lunged forwards, Clarke raised her sword in time to deflect the spear, only to find herself nearly impaled in the side when Ruffnut charged forwards while she was distracted. Ducking to the side, Clarke grabbed the shaft of the spear and yanked the weapon towards her, ramming the hilt of her own sword into Ruffnut's chest. She held back so that the blow wouldn't actually hurt the Viking-esque young woman, but it made enough of an impression to knock Ruffnut backwards while Clarke regained her balance. A sound from the side prompted Clarke to glance over, but she relaxed when she realised that the sound was just the watching Griffin and Barf and Belch, Griffin apparently laughing at the Zippleback for her victory over its rider (she'd have to ask what the right term was for Barf and Belch; the dragon was apparently male, but should she think of the two-headed dragon as 'he', 'they' or 'it'?).  
  
"Nice move," Ruffnut nodded at Clarke, drawing Clarke's attention back to the training ring, the young woman giving Clarke an approving smile even as she rubbed at her chest. "Could have done that harder, right?"  
  
"Well… Yeah, I just… didn't want to hurt you _that_ much," Clarke said tentatively, before her eyes narrowed as something else came to her. "And talking of hurting each other, were you actually trying to _stab_ me?"  
  
"Yep," Ruffnut affirmed.  
  
"Seriously?"  
  
"Hey, we can get that fights aren't gonna last long enough for you to get tired most of the time, but you're also not gonna learn to react properly in a fight if you don't _know_ how you'll react in a fight," Ruffnut responded. "We've been doing this for months, and we know how far to push each other; you'd get scars if you're not careful, but I was never gonna actually _impale_ you or anything."  
  
"Yeah; Hiccup'd get _really_ ticked off if we _seriously_ hurt each other," Tuffnut agreed.  
  
"That's… yeah, thanks," Clarke nodded. On one level, she was annoyed at how everyone on Earth seemed to take even training fights so seriously, but on the other hand she had to concede that Ruffnut made a good point that she'd only learn how she reacted in a fight if she was in real danger.  
  
"Anytime," Tuffnut nodded in understanding, before he stepped back to look up at the sky for a moment before he turned back to his sister with a shrug. "Actually, we should get back to patrol; can't protect this place by staying put, right?"  
  
"Right," Ruffnut nodded, before she looked over at Clarke. "Can you put the weapons away? We've got some… stuff to move around."  
  
"Sure," Clarke nodded in return. "Just… give me some time, OK?"  
  
"No need to hurry, Clarrie," Tuffnut nodded at her as the twins left the training ring. "You'll get the hang of it."  
  
As the twins walked off, Clarke was surprised to find that she was actually glad to be given something so relatively low-key to deal with. When most of her time with the 100 had forced her to take responsibility for everything from finding their next meal to convincing them that they needed some kind of rules, it was refreshing to be somewhere where they didn't expect her to do anything big.  
  
 _OK, so Mom and most of the Ark wanted me to 'be a kid' when they got down, but they just wanted to take over the situation and act like I hadn't done anything before they showed up; at least here they give me the small stuff because it needs doing rather than trying to humour me_.  
  
She appreciated that there was still a lot she wasn't being told about the situation here on the Edge, but so far she hadn't seen anything to suggest that she was dealing with another Mount Weather where they'd try to hurt her or use her to get to her friends for their own reasons…  
  
As she put the last of the spears on the rack, she paused for a moment to give her new sword a couple of practice swings, before she heard a brief snort from the side.  
  
"Sorry, Griffin," she grinned over at her dragon. "I guess you can get bored just like everyone else, right?"  
  
Griffin just let out a softer snort at that, but there was a slight edge to his expression that left Clarke at least fairly sure that she had understood him correctly.  
  
"C'mon," she said, looking over her dragon's rough scales with a thoughtful smile. "I think you could do with a bit of a rub-down, don't you?"  
  
Griffin let out an approving rumble, while a quick search revealed a few buckets off to the side of the training ring. A quick search of the area revealed a basic well that allowed her to fill a couple of the buckets with water, leaving her to take some strips of cloth and start rubbing down Griffin's looser scales.  
  
"So, are you settling in OK?" she said, looking curiously at the dragon. She wasn't sure if he could understand her or not, but the other dragons at least seemed to respond to their riders' words, so she would assume Griffin was the same, and the approving rumble he gave her seemed to be confirmation.  
  
"Yeah, I'm liking it here too," she grinned, rubbing around his wings. "I mean, I realise that there are a few things they're not telling us, but these guys seem like a good group, and… well, I assume the dragons are all right?"  
  
Griffin let out an approving rumble as he wrapped his tail around her for a moment, nudging his head against her before he stepped back and unwound his tail.  
  
"I'll take that as yes," Clarke smiled at him, continuing to rub down around the tail. "You don't have a… flock or something?"  
  
Griffin's expression became notably subdued at that question, as his head bowed in a manner that made Clarke feel suddenly uncomfortable.  
  
"You don't have a family?" Clarke asked, as Griffin let out a low affirmative rumble. "What did you go through before we met?"  
  
Griffin didn't respond to her question, but the way he nudged his head against her made her feel that he was affirming his loyalty to her over whatever he'd lost with his original 'family'.  
  
"Thanks," she said, reaching over to hug Griffin around the neck.  
  
" _And who might_ you _be, lassie_?"  
  
Turning around at the sound of the voice in the still-unfamiliar language, Clarke raised her sword defensively at the sight of the man standing before her. Unlike the other Riders, this was clearly a full-grown man, with the distinctive horned helmet of the popular Viking image, but he had a significant pot-belly and was wearing a fur tunic over a coal-stained yellow top and brown striped trousers. Aside from his long moustache, the most significant thing about the man's appearance was his right peg leg and the large hook where his left hand had once been, although Clarke also noticed a large metal tooth in his mouth. Alongside her, Griffin let out a cautionary growl, but stayed close to her in a manner that put her in mind of films she'd seen about dogs growling at potentially dangerous people.  
  
"Uh… who are you?" she asked, raising her sword slightly in her hand as she tried to evaluate if this man should be considered a threat or not. She didn't want to attack someone by accident after everything had gone wrong with the Grounders, but even with Griffin as back-up, she didn't want to let her guard too far down…  
  
"Gobber," the man said, folding his arms in a surprisingly efficient manner as he looked at her. "Ye know… traders' tongue? Who are ye?"  
  
"Oh, you're Gobber?" Clarke smiled in relief, letting herself relax more; she appreciated that the man could be lying, but there was no obvious reason for him to give her a false name when not many people could have known that Gobber was expected here anyway. "I'm Clarke; I… Hiccup saved me from some people who were threatening Griffin, and invited me back."  
  
"Ah, I see," the large man nodded in understanding as his gaze shifted to the Windstriker behind her. "And I suppose this fellow would be Griffin?"  
  
"I found him with an injured wing, stayed to help him heal, and after Hiccup helped us… well, here we are," Clarke smiled tentatively at the older man as Griffin curled his neck around her so that his head was directly in front of her, allowing her to scratch an area just behind his chin-horn that Clarke had learned comforted the dragon without knocking him out. "He and the others let me stay here and I'm helping out while learning a bit more about Griffin- but they're not _all_ gone, Hiccup's doing some work and the twins are around here somewhere-"  
  
"Easy, lass, I believe you," Gobber chuckled slightly as he looked at her. "Ye'd hardly be sittin' around like this if you'd just taken the Edge by force, especially not wi' that fine beast beside ye."  
  
"Uh… thanks?" Clarke said, looking at Griffin thoughtfully for a moment before she looked back at Gobber. "I take it Griffin's healthy?"  
  
"Finest-lookin' Windstriker I've seen in all me years," Gobber nodded at her in approval before his expression became quizzical. "Ye have tae ask?"  
  
"Well, Griffin was the first dragon I ever met, and Hiccup and the others haven't mentioned seeing one themselves, so… well, if you'd seen them before, I wanted to be sure," Clarke clarified, warmly patting the side of her dragon's head. "Anyway, I take it you're here to see Hiccup?"


	11. Tuffnut the Were-Dragon?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In advance, when I get to the events of the episode I'm rewriting here, I'm adjusting the timeline of events a bit for the sake of narrative ease, but since I'm altering the order of when the Riders experienced these events in the first place, I think it all still works

"So," Gobber looked at Hiccup with a thoughtful smile as they waited around the heated forge, "how did you find that Clarke girl out there anyway?"

"I was following the Skrill after we saved it from the hunters, and found Clarke on an island as she and Griffin were trying to fight off a few attackers," Hiccup explained, carefully watching the warm metal in the forge. The other riders hadn't returned yet, but there was still time for them to intercept the latest hunt Heather had brought to their attention and then come back, so he wasn't going to worry about them just yet, and it made sense to brief Gobber on their new acquaintance.

"And then she came back here?" Gobber glanced out of the forge area towards the just-visible dome, where Clarke was currently going through a few practice motions with a sword.

"Pretty much," Hiccup nodded. "I mean, I spoke with her a bit to work out what she knew about dragons and how she met Griffin in the first place, so since she didn't have anywhere to go, I… well, I invited her to follow me back."

"Really?" Gobber looked at Hiccup with a teasing smile.

" _Gobber_ …"

"Eh, let an old Viking have his fun, lad; we both know ye've been a one-woman man from the moment ye realised girls an' boys had a few key differences," Gobber grinned at Hiccup before he looked more seriously at his former apprentice. "Seriously, though, what made ye bring an outsider here?"

"Firstly, she's not exactly an outsider when she's already training a dragon," Hiccup countered. "Secondly, we've already agreed that we're not going to tell her anything _important_ until we're sure we can trust her; she's been learning a bit about dragons, but we haven't told her anything about the Eye or exactly where Berk is."

"…Yeah, yer father'll be fine wi' that," Gobber nodded in contemplation. "So, based on the way she reacted ter me, I assume Trader's tongue is her main language, but have ye seen any sign that she understands Berkian?"

"Well, she's always looked confused when we're talking in it in front of her, but that aside… not really," Hiccup said, his expression suddenly concerned as a new thought came to him. "I mean, maybe she just hasn't _shown_ us she can understand Berkian, but there's not exactly a reason for her to hide that from us for this long when we haven't told her we're not telling her certain things… and she's keeping a few things from us too."

"She is?"

"She just… well, she's told us a few things, like that her dad was executed and she was part of an expeditionary force sent out by her people before they were ready to land themselves, but the way she told it…" Hiccup shrugged. "I already talked it over with Astrid and Tuffnut, and we all agreed that she's hiding something about her past from us, but none of us think it's anything _bad_ , just something she's not sure how to talk about."

"I see…" Gobber nodded in thought for a moment, before he looked at the metal on the forge. "And when she took you all to this ship o' hers, it was made _entirely_ of metal?"

"The part we saw, anyway," Hiccup said. "I mean, there'd been some damage, so maybe the wooden bits were lost when it ran aground or something, but… I mean, look at this stuff."

"Impressive work, I'll give it that," Gobber said, tapping his hook against the basic Viking shape Hiccup had forged from the metal Clarke had given them. "Light, sturdy, and apparently able to take a fair amount o' heat afore it'll melt itself…"

"I was thinking that we could use some of this to cover a target to test how much damage it can actually take once everyone gets back," Hiccup explained. "I mean, the twins are out on patrol at the moment, but everyone else should be back soon, and it's not like we need Barf and Belch for this; they can't exactly produce the kind of fine attack we need to see what this thing can cope with."

"True," Gobber nodded, his attention returning to the metal. "You think it can be used for armour?"

"It seems like it could be light enough, if I can forge it into the right shape," Hiccup conceded thoughtfully, before he looked back at Gobber. "Anyway, as long as you're here, maybe you could help me refine my ideas?"

* * *

"Sure ye want ter be here rather than takin' part?" Gobber looked curiously at Fishlegs and Clarke as the two teens stood beside the large blacksmith.  
  
"Meatlug needs time to finish… preparing the next batch of Gronckle iron," Fishlegs shrugged, indicating where his dragon sat alongside him with a slightly strained expression on her face.  
  
"Gronckle iron?" Clarke asked.  
  
"A super-tough light metal we created a couple of years ago after Meatlug ate a particular collection of rocks, and then ended up losing because I couldn't work out how to make it properly," Fishlegs admitted sheepishly. "Seeing all the metal on your ship gave me a few ideas about how I might be able to refine what I had for the recipe, but I'd prefer to go over it with Gobber later."  
  
"Fair enough," Clarke nodded in understanding before she turned back to Gobber. "And as for why I'm here, Griffin just isn't really the best suited for this kind of target practice-"  
  
Clarke winced as she felt her dragon 'tap' her over the head with his tail from where he lay at the side of the field, but it was undermined by the smile she gave him as she looked over at the dragon. "Sorry, but you know I'm right; metal isn't going to be hurt by hot air even if you _will_ be able to knock it down."  
  
Griffin let out a condescending snort even as he seemed to accept that explanation and settled down again, watching as Snotlout and Hookfang flew down to fire a blast of flames at the target with a loud whoop of victory from Snotlout.  
  
"He _really_ likes showing off, doesn't he?"  
  
"That's Snotlout," Fishlegs shook his head. "He can't resist making a big display of everything…"  
  
"Whereas Hiccup," Gobber added with a certain pride in his voice as the purple plasma of the Night Fury struck the target, "will just get the job done and move along."  
  
"And then the twins just come in and make a mess?" Clarke asked as the Zippleback flew down and stamped all over the now-fallen target, before she noticed something about the two-headed dragon and its suddenly single rider. "Hold on… that's just Ruffnut; where's Tuffnut?"  
  
"Stand back!" Astrid's voice called out from above. "Get that thing back up, and we'll see how this metal holds up to a close-range spine shot!"  
  
"Fire away!" Clarke grinned up at the other girl as she, Gobber and Fishlegs stepped back from the field while the Nadder flew in close…  
  
"Giant… furry… teeth…" a voice muttered from the side, Clarke looking over at the source only for her eyes to widen in shock at the sight of Tuffnut walking up to the target, leaves in his helmet and holding his arm in a pained manner.  
  
"Tuff, no!" Hiccup yelled.  
  
"Tuffnut, _move_!" Clarke yelled, even as she found herself unable to take action herself; if she dived forward to try and Tuffnut out of the path of those spines, she could just end up getting shot by them herself…  
  
She didn't know if Stormfly was that good or if Tuffnut was just lucky, but the spines fired by the Nadder missed the staggering male twin and struck the target behind him.  
  
"Thank Loki," Tuffnut said, as though the close call had shaken him out of his earlier disorientation as he turned to look at the grounded watchers. "You guys are not gonna believe what just happened to me; it was-"  
  
Tuffnut was interrupted when the metal Viking fell on top of him, leaving the group to run over as the flyers landed their dragons around him.  
  
"We'll… talk in a little bit," Tuffnut said, wincing from his position on the ground even as Barf and Belch paced over to lift the metal Viking off him.

* * *

Clarke wasn't sure if she should be grateful at the chance to demonstrate her ability to heal or annoyed at how she always had to improvise medical treatments since she'd come to Earth. She appreciated that she was often the closest thing her associates had to a medical expert on a regular basis, and she genuinely liked being able to help people, but just once she'd like to have a full medical wing available to her, rather than having to improvise based on a few gathered herbs and strips of cloth. As far as she could tell, there was nothing wrong with Tuffnut beyond some scratches on his arms and a possible concussion to account for his initial disorientation, but she'd be sure to keep an eye on him for the next few hours just in case.  
  
"There I was," Tuffnut said, sitting on the edge of the table with a very dramatic expression on his face. "Me and my inner Nut-"  
  
"Which we do _not_ want to hear anything more about, so what exactly happened to you out there?" Clarke asked.  
  
"It was dark," Tuffnut said, in a manner that made it unclear if he'd heard Clarke or not. "So dark… not even the moon to light my merry way… and then all of a sudden, out of the darkness, red eyes! Ferocious teeth! A growl that could peel the beak off a chicken!"  
  
Tuffnut's chicken squawked from beside him in what Clarke could swear was an indignant manner.  
  
"Sorry; metaphor," Tuffnut apologised to the chicken before he continued, picking up the chicken to briefly shake it as he spoke. "It grabbed me and tossed me around like a rag doll- a very handsome rag doll- and then it left me for dead."  
  
"Hold on; you think that the _moon_ should have been lighting your way?" Clarke cut in. "You've only been away from camp for the last couple of hours; the sun hasn't even set yet!"  
  
" _Exactly_!" Tuffnut said. "That's why it was so dark in the forest!"  
  
"…Right," Clarke shook her head before glancing over at Hiccup. "This kind of… weird logic is normal for him, right?"  
  
"Yeah," Hiccup nodded tentatively.  
  
"Had to be sure," Clarke said; so long as she didn't have to treat Tuffnut for excess delusions, she could work with his apparent state.  
  
"OK, Tuffnut, can you tell us anything _else_ about what attacked you?" Fishlegs put in.  
  
"It was far too fast," Tuffnut shook his head. "Too… cagey, too… quick, give me another adjective!"  
  
"How about 'imaginary'?" Snotlout asked.  
  
"Really?" Clarke looked over at Snotlout, before she reached out to grab Tuffnut's wrist and brandish it in front of the shortest Viking, indicating the teeth marks on his upper arm. "And I suppose these are just psychosomatic?"  
  
The blank stares she received from the other Vikings prompted Clarke to shake her head apologetically. "Sorry; 'psychosomatic' is a term from… my people… which basically means that someone becomes so convinced that they're ill that they _make_ themselves ill even though there's no reason they should be."  
  
"That's possible?" Fishlegs looked curiously at her.  
  
"The mind is an amazing thing sometimes," Clarke nodded, before she turned her attention back to Tuffnut's arm. "So can we get back to working out what actually bit Tuffnut?"  
  
"Glowing red eyes and that particular bite pattern…" Fishlegs looked tentatively at the arm. "Maybe if I can compare them to the Book of Dragons…"  
  
"Oh, you're not gonna find anything on this dragon _there_ ," Gobber said dismissively. "Or anythin' else ye look up, for that matter."  
  
"Why not?" Clarke looked curiously at the older man.  
  
"It's obvious we're all thinkin' the same thing here."  
  
"Well, I can pretty much guarantee we're not, but, uh, why don't you tell us what _you're_ thinking, Gobber," Hiccup said, after exchanging awkward glances with the other teens.  
  
"Lycanwing," Gobber said solemnly.  
  
"Excuse me?" Clarke looked at the man in surprise, mind flashing to memories of the stories her father had told her about supernatural creatures when he ran out of things to tell her about the dragon sanctuary that particular week. "Are we talking about… people turning _into_ dragons?"  
  
"Precisely," Gobber nodded solemnly at her before he began to pace around the hut. "The Lycanwing dragon is a rare beast, and a vicious one at that. Those who survive its bite are not actually survivors at all; they are doomed to a life as half-man, half-Lycanwing. At the height of every full moon, the condemned Viking transforms into a terrifying dragon! Wings the size of a house, teeth stronger than Gronckle Iron! And a thirst...for blood."  
  
Tuffnut yelped in terror as Gobber leaned dramatically over the table.  
  
"Oh for crying out- that isn't _possible_ , Tuffnut!" Clarke glared over at him. "You are _not_ going to turn into a dragon; this isn't some… horror story!"  
  
"Exactly!" Hiccup nodded at her before he turned back to the male twin. "The Lycanwing isn't a real dragon, it's just a myth! Gobber, have you ever _seen_ a Lycanwing?"  
  
"No…" Gobber conceded.  
  
"Has anyone on Berk _ever_ seen a Lycanwing?"  
  
"Not that I can recall," Gobber conceded, after Snotlout and Fishlegs exchanged glances.  
  
"I rest my case," Hiccup nodded.  
  
"But the stories… oooh!" Gobber said, his mood shifting. "They'll straighten the hair on a curly-haired yak!"  
  
"What kind of stories?" Clarke asked, curious despite her own scepticism.  
  
"His name was Kessler," Gobber continued solemnly.  
  
"That's a _weird_ name," Snotlout said (Clarke resisted the urge to point out that Snotlout had no right to say anyone else had a weird name given his own).  
  
"Weird kid," Gobber conceded. "Bright red hair, eyes as black as night, naughty as a nadder in a chicken coop!"  
  
"Why would-?" Clarke looked over at Astrid.  
  
"Nadders really enjoy chicken," Astrid clarified. "I've used it to help build up Stormfly's stamina; she's almost as fast as Toothless when she's been feeding on chicken for long enough."  
  
" _One night_ ," Gobber said, glaring at the talking teens before he continued his story, "little Kessler, against his parents' wishes, went exploring in the forest. Days went by, no sign of him, only a far away scream, coming from the woods. The little bugger never returned… or _did he_?"  
  
"Did he?" Clarke asked, even as Fishlegs shook in terror.  
  
"Every year from then on," Gobber continued, with a smirk, "when little Kessler's birthday rolled around, a red, black-eyed dragon would fly over his parents' house and pluck one of their sheep right out of the paddock! The dragon would look back, taunting them… BUUUT I wouldn't worry, Tuffnut, you're not exhibiting any symptoms."  
  
"Hey, hey, hey, can we really say for sure what our pal Tuffnut is exhibiting?" Snotlout put in with a smirk. "C'mon Gobster, lay em' on us! Just for the sake of argument."  
  
"I don't think that's a good idea, Snotlout," Ruffnut said, shooting a glance over at Clarke as though asking for help.  
  
"Well, first off," Gobber continued before Clarke could say anything, "you'd be looking at a sensitivity to light."  
  
"Aren't you always saying that it hurts your head when you look into the sun?" Snotlout grinned.  
  
"Yeah… I _did_ say that," Tuffnut began.  
  
"That happens to _everyone_ , it's not like-" Clarke began.  
  
"AH!" Tuffnut yelled, leaping back as he stared out of the hut's main door, a quick glance confirming to Clarke that Tuffnut must have seen the sun in the sky outside.  
  
"Unquenchable thirst…" Gobber continued, as Tuffnut began gasping and licking his fingers.  
  
"You look thirsty…" Snotlout began, before Ruffnut smacked Snotlout in the face.  
  
"He _always_ looks thirsty!" the girl protested.  
  
"What else, Gobber?" Snotlout said even as he shifted slightly out of Ruffnut's range. "There's gotta be more than _that_."  
  
"Fidgety arms," Gobber confirmed, "on account of the wings starting to sprout."  
  
As though on cue, Tuffnut's arms suddenly began fidgeting and twitching on either side of his body, one slapping Ruffnut in the face before she could join the other teens in moving out of range.  
  
"Oh for- will you both _stop_ that?" Clarke protested as she grabbed Tuffnut's arm and glared between Snotlout and Gobber. "You're just provoking-"  
  
"What else?" Snotlout asked eagerly. "What else?"  
  
"Finally," Gobber concluded, "the overwhelming desire to eat raw fish."  
  
With those final words, Tuffnut ran over to Barf and Belch's feeding trough and practically plunged his head into it, raising his head up with a fish held between his teeth and two more in his hands before he ran away, muttering something about them tasting terrible. Snotlout began to laugh, but was stopped when Clarke slapped him in the back of the head at virtually the same moment Ruffnut drove her fist into his gut, each glaring in contempt at the shortest Viking.  
  
"This is pretty much that psycho-stuff you were talking about, right?" Ruffnut asked, looking over at Clarke as Snotlout bent over between them.  
  
"I'm thinking it is," Clarke nodded, before she indicated the area on her upper arm where she'd seen Tuffnut's bite mark. "Although we still need to explain where _that_ came from before we can rule anything else out, in case he's just having a bad reaction to something…"


	12. Tuffnut's Bequests

Sitting in the clubhouse with the others with the rest of the young riders, Clarke was privately ashamed of how well these people were handling the situation compared to how her own had faced some of their past challenges. Frankly, after the way some of her people had basically ended up complaining about things not being handled perfectly on the ground without thinking about the grey areas of the situations facing them, it was slightly refreshing to be faced with a problem where people weren't blaming her for not being able to provide a perfect solution right off the bat.

"So… you don't believe Gobber's theory, right?"

" _No_ ," Clarke looked back at Astrid, biting back the scale of her reaction when she registered the obviously sceptical expression on the other girl's face. "I mean, I get that we can't identify what bit Tuffnut right now, but the idea that something like that can make a person turn into something else… it just doesn't _work_."

"Exactly," Fishlegs said, even as Clarke noted a slight apprehension in his eyes. "I mean, Gobber's story was… well, it's dramatic, but-"

Fishlegs trailed off as he waved an awkward hand, but Clarke was spared from asking him for his further thoughts when Tuffnut walked solemnly into the hut, a wheelbarrow in front of him with a strange mix of objects in it.

"Uh… Tuffnut?" Hiccup looked tentatively at the male twin. "What are you doing?"

In response, Tuffnut sighed sadly as he stopped in front of Clarke and took out a surprisingly shiny mace.

"I give you Macey," he said, passing the large weapon to Clarke. "Hold her dearly, she likes sitting by the window, looking at the moon… the full moon. Ha! The irony."

"Uh… thanks?" Clarke said, as she tentatively took the offered weapon, deciding not to question the idea of naming a weapon (she forced down the sudden question of if any of the Grounders had such a habit back on the mainland). "Not that I don't… appreciate it, but… why me?"

"You offered help in the face of the impossible, and you are the newest Dragon Rider," Tuffnut proclaimed solemnly. "If I'm leaving the group, you'll need a few edges to make up for my absence, and I feel that you and Macey would appreciate each other properly."

"I… right," Clarke nodded, wondering if she should be flattered or bemused at this offer as she held the mace and tested its weight.

"Fishlegs," Tuffnut continued as he moved around the table. "I give you my favourite bowl."

"Hey, that's my bowl!" Fishlegs yelled as he glanced at the bowl in his hands.

"And now, now you've found it," Tuffnut said, still unnervingly calm. "Eat well, my friend. Eat well."

Moving further along, he turned his attention to the group leader. "Hiccup, Hiccup, Hiccup. What do you give the man who has everything?"

With those words, he placed his hands on Ruffnut's shoulders and moved her towards the one-legged man.

"Hey, you can't give me away!" Ruffnut protested.

"In time, she'll come to you," Tuffnut said solemnly, again ignoring the reaction his 'offer' had received. "She's going to take this very hard, and will most certainly go through a prolonged morning period. She's gonna need a new twin brother. I nominate _you_. It's a terrible job and she smells horrible. You'll have to dress like me and grow your hair long, so there _are_ perks."

"Alright, alright!" Hiccup waved his hands in confusion. "What did I miss?"

"I'm just… preparing myself," Tuffnut said as he moved to the hut's main door.

"For what?" Astrid asked.

"Astrid, have you seen that moon?" Tuffnut indicated the door, with the moon now visible in the dark sky outside. "It rises to its apex, which I think is a word that means the tip-top. I'm going _full_ dragon, Tuffnut Lycanwing."

In response, Snotlout burst out laughing, only to be cut off when Tuffnut was suddenly leaning into the shorter Viking's face. "You're a funny guy, Snotlout; I'll eat you first."

"Tuff, we went over this," Hiccup said in an attempt to be reassuring. "The Lycanwing is a myth, it's not real, you're _not_ turning into a dragon! Fishlegs, Clarke, will you please tell him?"

"It's biologically impossible for the human body to transform in the manner that would be needed for this story to work," Clarke confirmed.

"Well…" Fishlegs said tentatively, only for his voice to trail off into awkward mutterings.

"What?" Clarke looked over at Fishlegs. "Look, I'm sorry to be blunt, but my mother trained me as a healer and you're basically our chronicler; I'm not saying you're stupid, but I _think_ I know more about how the human body works than you do-"

"And you told us that you thought dragons were all dead until you found Griffin," Fishlegs pointed out awkwardly. "How can you _know_ -?"

"Please, don't try and make me feel 'better'," Tuffnut held up his hands. "I must go and say my most difficult goodbye of all, if you'll excuse me."

As the thin blond young man walked out of the hut, Snotlout burst out laughing again, only for Ruffnut to walk to him with rage practically vibrating out of every part of her body.

" _What_ did I tell you?" the female twin glared at the shortest Viking. "WHAT DID I TELL YOU?! YOU are gonna help me _fix_ this, Snotlout! YOU HEAR ME?!"

"Wow, they can really get riled up, huh?" Snotlout grinned as Ruffnut stormed off, only to be met with cold glares from Astrid and Clarke.

"For your sake," Clarke finally stated, "I'm going to assume that's a reference to the twins rather than some misogynist crap about women."

"Miso-what?" Snotlout asked.

"Never mind," Clarke shook her head; there was no time to give a man from what seemed to be the second Viking age a lecture about the meaning of certain terms when she had another 'patient' who was basically suffering a bizarre kind of breakdown.

"OK," Hiccup looked at Clarke. "Any chance that we can help Tuffnut get over this?"

"Well, if he thinks he's going to turn into a dragon tonight, maybe we just… give him until tomorrow morning?" Clarke shrugged. "I mean, when he _doesn't_ turn into anything, he could just… get over this?"

"It's worth a shot," Astrid conceded as she nodded at the other blonde. "Tuffnut might be weird, but he's not _that_ much of an idiot."

* * *

"Well, I did my best," Gobber said as Clarke waited outside the stables with Hiccup, Astrid and their dragons, while Tuffnut had apparently spent the night locked in one of the dragon cages. "He's not talking to anyone but that chicken, and he's convinced that the moon didn't apex _last_ night, so it must be tonight."  
  
"Well, _that's_ great," Hiccup shook his head in exasperation, looking at where Tuffnut was anxiously shaking his pet bird in his 'cage'.  
  
"At least he's trying to keep himself locked up from the rest of us," Clarke mused. "I mean, I'm not saying he's _going_ to change, but it says a lot about his priorities."  
  
"Hey," Astrid looked behind and up. "Is that…?"  
  
"Ruffnut… flying Hookfang?" Hiccup said uncertainly as the form of the large red dragon came closer to the Edge.  
  
"Where's Snotlout?" Astrid asked.  
  
"There he is," Gobber observed. "Big lump behind her; tear-stained face."  
  
Clarke only just had time to register the sound of Snotlout's sobs before the dragon basically crash-landed on the edge of the 'landing pad' in front of the stables, Ruffnut rolling off the front while Snotlout fell to the side.  
  
"Oh, rough one," Ruffnut observed as she got back to her feet before Hookfang blew steam at her and lumbered away, leaving Snotlout groaning in pain on the ground.  
  
"What's wrong with him?" Clarke asked, moving over to examine the tear-stained Viking.  
  
"He's been helping me gather samples," Ruffnut said.  
  
"Samples of what?" Clarke asked. In response, Ruffnut held up Snotlout's arm, revealing a series of bite marks between the leather straps the shorter Viking wore.  
  
"Dragon bites," the female twin answered as though anticipating Clarke's question. "One of these has to match Tuff's and convince him that this Lycanwing deal is just another one of his paranoid fantasies."  
  
"Ah," Clarke nodded.  
  
"And why is Snotlout-?" Hiccup began.  
  
"He _started_ this stupid thing with his impressive yet sinister powers of suggestion," Ruffnut said scornfully. "It's all Snotlout's fault my dopey brother thinks he's turning into a dragon."  
  
"Ah," Clarke nodded. "Well, I don't approve of the methods, but I can understand the reasons."  
  
"Looks like you're in _this_ one, Snotlout," Hiccup said nonchalantly.  
  
"Not so funny now, is it?" Ruffnut observed.  
  
"No, Ruffnut," Snotlout said, shaking his head as he held his arm. " _Not_ funny at all."  
  
"Let's go, pal," Ruffnut said, grabbing the Viking and dragging him into the stables.  
  
"Hiccup, Hiccup!" Fishlegs called down as he and Meatlug flew towards the group. "You're not going to believe this! I was at my wit's end, trying to think of something, anything, that could help with this, when my perfect little angel crushed my desk, and-"  
  
" _Hold it_ ," Hiccup said, looking over at Fishlegs before he turned to Clarke. "Clarke, actually it just occurred to me; maybe you should you… see if Ruff and Snot need any help?"  
  
"…Sure," Clarke nodded, turning to follow the other two into the stable. She understood that she was being redirected from the main group for some reason, but this wasn't the time to argue about Hiccup keeping something from her. When she was still the newest member of this strange collection of dragon-riding teenagers, she could appreciate that Hiccup might be keeping some things from her when he wasn't sure if she could be trusted long-term.  
  
At least nobody seemed to be playing 'games' with her like what she'd heard about Lexa's first meeting with Jaha and Kane in the Grounders' dungeons; she could cope with being kept in ignorance so long as they weren't actively _lying_ to her, and she'd seen nothing to indicate that they wouldn't _eventually_ tell her the truth once they decided to trust her with it…  
  
"…not flat, it's gotta be round, or oblong at the very least," Tuffnut was saying as Clarke walked up to the cage, Clarke unsure if he was talking to one of his guests or his chicken. "Think about it. The moon, round. Sun, round. My head, oblong."  
  
"Uh… I hate to interrupt this _fascinating_ debate, but-" Ruffnut began from the door of the cage.  
  
"Stand back, sis!" Tuffnut said urgently. "It's not safe to be around me right now; I could go at any minute!"  
  
"If you say so," Clarke observed, as the chicken bawked and the two teens outside the cage looked at her in surprise.  
  
"What are-?" Ruffnut asked.  
  
"Hiccup… sent me to help you out," Clarke explained, before looking over at Tuffnut. "Anyway, if you'll just hold out your arm, we need to check a few things."  
  
"Please," Snotlout said shakily. "I'm pretty sure I need serious medical attention…"  
  
"What happened to you?" Tuffnut looked at the other male teen in surprise as Snotlout placed his arm inside the cage.  
  
"He's basically being used as a test subject to work out what actually bit you," Clarke clarified.  
  
"I think we all know what happened-"  
  
"Then it doesn't hurt anyone for us to be sure," Clarke cut him. "Look, just hold your arm out and we can get this over with."  
  
Nodding in acceptance, Tuffnut walked up to Snotlout and held out his bitten arm.  
  
"Well," the female twin sighed as she and Clarke studied the wound, "we can cross Terrible Terror, Night Terror, wild Nadder, and Gronckle off the list."  
  
"And I take it we're automatically taking Zippleback, Nightmare, Windstriker and Night Fury off the list because there aren't any of those around here apart from ours?" Clarke asked.  
  
"Yeah; if Tuff got bitten by any of our guys, we'd have already worked that bit out," Ruffnut nodded at Clarke before she turned back to Snotlout. "Let's go."  
  
"I'm not going anywhere with-!" Snoutlout began in protest.  
  
"If you don't go with _her_ now, I'm pretty sure she's going to do something more drastic, so put up with it and hope for the best," Clarke cut him off.  
  
"Exactly!" Ruffnut grinned at her before she dragged Snotlout out of the stable, leaving Clarke to look after them with a wistful sigh.  
  
"Are siblings always this determined to help each other?" she glanced at Tuffnut.  
  
"Only kid, huh?" Tuffnut smiled at her.  
  
"Culturally, actually."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"Space on our ship was so limited that families were all only meant to have one child; two of my original survey mission were basically exiled because their mother had a girl a couple of years after her son and spent over a decade keeping her hidden," Clarke explained with a wistful smile. "They care about each other, but Bellamy sometimes ends up basically smothering Octavia when she'd prefer some independence, and one time he ended up torturing a potential ally because he was worried about her when she was actually fine…"  
  
"Huh," Tuffnut repeated in a more thoughtful manner. "Must've sucked; not having even the _option_ of a sibling, I mean."  
  
"It's hard to judge something when it's all you've ever known," Clarke said. "I had a friend who might as well have been a brother as far as I was concerned, but he… well, he was at least a bit interested in more, until he…"  
  
She shook her head, forcing the painful memories of Wells down, before she turned back to Tuffnut. "Anyway, I'm going to go and try and make sure your sister doesn't kill Snotlout using him as a test subject; just… don't do anything stupid until we get back, OK?"  
  
She wasn't entirely sure how far she could reign the other girl in, but after such mistakes as nearly letting everyone lynch Murphy for Wells' death, she had to do what she could to stop Ruffnut going so far that she basically ended up killing Snotlout…


	13. Saving Tuffnut

"OK," Clarke said, as she spat out her last glass of water to glare over at Ruffnut, "that had better be the last bite you want to test on Snotlout here, because I am _not_ doing that again."

"Amazed you wanted to do it the first time," Ruffnut mused from her position against the tree.

"I don't like seeing people die even if they're officially my enemies, and this guy's just an idiot."

"I'm _right here_ -" Snotlout tried to protest as he sat up.

"And you've driven someone to a point where I'm worried he's going to have some kind of psychotic breakdown because you wanted to have a laugh; I'm sure you can understand why you're not my favourite person right now," Clarke said.

"Why did you do that anyway?" Ruffnut asked. "That bit with the oil, I mean…"

"Just remembered something I heard from… a story," Clarke said (she didn't have time to start telling these people about films, even if a few of her pre-prison friends had enjoyed the classics such as that _Snakes on a Plane_ movie). "I wasn't sure if it would work, but it probably helped get some of the venom out before it spread too far."

"You didn't know if it would _work_?" Snotlout yelled at her.

"Fair enough," Ruffnut said before she turned her attention back to Snotlout. "Well, we'd better get you to Tuff and make sure he's not done anything overly stupid."

"Good, because I _really_ think I've done enough to make up for-"

"You've just done everything we can think of to help us find out what happened to Tuffnut; you're only off the hook for driving him to his current state when he's _over_ it," Clarke corrected him. "We've ruled out sea snake and basically every other dragon on the island, so if it's not any of those that bit him, what else could have done it?"

"Let's just get back to the Edge and see how he's doing," Ruffnut sighed. "I mean, if he hasn't turned by now, maybe we can help him snap out of this nutso state if Hiccup hasn't done it already…"

"God, am I glad you're not my sister-" Snotlout began.

"No!" Ruffnut reached over to slap Snotlout

"You _wish_ I was your sister. You think I'd be dragging your monkey butt all over the jungle risking your life if my brother weren't the most important thing in the world to me? Think about that!"

"Family is important," Clarke nodded. "Which is why we need to make sure Tuffnut's all right."

* * *

"He's gone?" Ruffnut glared at the empty stable where her brother had been just a few hours ago. "How did this happen?"  
  
"I don't know," Astrid shook her head apologetically. "I was on patrol after Hiccup and Fishlegs left to check up a lead-"  
  
"A lead?" Clarke looked at her in surprise. "What kind of lead?"  
  
"They… were going over some of our old records and found something that might tell us more about the lycanwing."  
  
"Hold on; _now_ we're thinking that's real?" Snotlout protested. "After you all spent ages trying to tell Tuff he was an idiot?"  
  
"That's not important right now," Clarke looked scathingly at Snotlout as she indicated the full moon rising in the distance. "What's important is that Hiccup found something he felt he had to check out, and given the faith you all have in him, that might have been enough to push Tuffnut… well, just that bit further on his current breakdown."  
  
"He's having a breakdown?"  
  
"He thinks he's turning into a dragon; that's not the sign of a stable mind," Clarke countered, looking up at the darkening sky in frustration. "Look, in his current state, there's no way of knowing _how_ Tuffnut's going to react to whatever he thinks is about to happen to him; we need to find him before he does something stupid."  
  
"She's right," Astrid nodded. "Everyone needs to start searching the island; Barf and Belch are still here so Tuff can't have gone far, but we need to get moving if we're going to catch up to him."  
  
"Tell me about it," Ruffnut said grimly. "Even if he does turn into a dragon, what are the odds that he'll survive that flight?"  
  
"We're on it," Clarke nodded, before she joined the other Riders in heading into the forests around the Edge, the group splitting up to cover more ground. It was only after she started that Clarke mused she probably should have tried to do this on Griffin, but quickly decided that it was probably a good thing she did this by herself. Griffin was good company, but searching through the woods was simple enough, and she didn't want to become so dependent on her dragon that she couldn't do anything on her own. She kept looking back to keep a better sense of the best route back to the Edge while making her way through the forest, but soon began to wonder if she wouldn't have been better sticking with Griffin after all; she really hadn't spent enough time learning about this island's geography, apart from flying over it during that mess with the other Nightmare…  
  
"Tuffnut?" Clarke called out tentatively, only for her ears to prick up as she heard a strange roaring sound from further into the woods. Taking a moment to trace the sound, and once again regretting that she didn't train herself to track on her own before she left Camp Jaha, Clarke made her way to a more open part of the woods where she saw Tuffnut walking alongside his pet chicken.  
  
" _I can't be contained, Chicken_ ," Tuffnut said, a deranged grin on his face that put Clarke in mind of some of the nightmares she'd had about Finn shooting that village. " _Look at that moon… a matter of hours, it will finally apex, and I will be transformed into a giant scaly beast! With nothing to do but feast on my prey_!"  
  
The young Viking crouched down to sniff the ground and then reared back to let out a loud roar. " _Oh! It's_ _like all my senses are alive for the first time! I can_ _feel_ _things! See things! Hear things I've never been able to before! You know what I mean, Chicken_?"  
  
When Tuffnut let out a surprised yell and then began to talk to his chicken as though he was responding to it, Clarke knew that she had to step in.  
  
"OK, Tuffnut," she said, stepping out from behind the tree and trying to look reassuringly at him, "I think we should just-"  
  
"Leave me, Clarke," Tuffnut proclaimed (Clarke supposed she should be grateful he wasn't yet crazy enough to remember that she couldn't understand his native language yet). "I have to get away from you all before I go full dragon; I seek the tallest cliff for my first flight-"  
  
"You don't have to do this, Tuffnut!" Clarke protested. "You're not going to-"  
  
"Only a fool lives his future in the past," Tuffnut proclaimed, before his attention returned to the bird in his arms. " _Our time is short, Chicken; come, our fate is sealed_!"  
  
With those words, Tuffnut ran past Clarke towards the edge of the forest, leaving Clarke to roll her eyes in frustration and hurry after him. She registered Ruffnut calling out from another part of the forest, and wondered if she'd heard her twin or this was another example of that 'twin bond' she'd heard about in pre-Ark stories, but right now her priority was to find her new friend. As she reached the edge of the forest, she found Tuffnut standing on the edge of a cliff, literally howling up at the moon as he held the chicken in his hands.  
  
" _The apex is upon us_!" the young Viking proclaimed. Despite herself, Clarke couldn't resist the temptation to just sit and watch for a few moments, taking in the other boy's activities out of a morbid sense of curiosity as to how far he'd go…  
  
" _C'mon, do it with me, Chicken_!" the long-haired Viking proclaimed. " _It feels so_ good _! And we only have a few moments left till we can fly! FLYYY! Riding high! The currents of the wind blowing through our hair! Ah, I mean, your feathers, you have feathers, not hair- FREE from the_ bonds _that bind humankind_!"  
  
 _If this wasn't completely ridiculous- and assuming it sounds as interesting in English as it does in whatever his language is- he might actually have potential to be a kind of poet…_  
  
" _We have to fly away, right_?" Tuffnut continued as he held the chicken in front of his face. " _I would never forgive myself if I ate the other dragon riders. I mean, on the other side though, I'm sure as a dragon I would find them_ delicious _, especially that Fishlegs, good_ Thor _he looks like a marshmallow! Flesh-colored in with a little hair on the top_ …"  
  
 _Did he say 'marshmallow_ '? Clarke wondered in surprise at the familiar-sounding word. _They're meant to be Vikings; how do these people have any knowledge of marshmallows_?  
  
" _It's happening, it's happening, I can_ feel _it_!" Tuffnut howled as he stood on the very edge of the cliff after another roaring session. " _Are you ready, Chicken? Are you finally ready to be free_?"  
  
" _STOP_!" Clarke yelled desperately as Tuffnut took a step towards the edge of the cliff.  
  
"DON'T DO IT!" Ruffnut's voice yelled from behind Clarke as the other twin joined them.  
  
"We've been _through_ this, Chicken!" Tuffnut yelled at the bird in his arms. "Don't try and impersonate my sister, and adding Clarke into the picture doesn't make it any better! We made a pact! I'm doing it and you're coming with me!"  
  
"Did that chicken ever try and impersonate _me_ before now?" Clarke cut in (and what did it say about these people that she already felt that sentence wasn't quite so ridiculous?).  
  
"You can _fight this_!" Ruffnut affirmed (Clarke chose to appreciate that the female twin was including her in this 'chat').  
  
"I can't, sis," Tuffnut said, still apparently sane enough to follow his sister's cue. "You don't know the hold it has on me. It has its claws on me."  
  
"What if we fight it together?" Ruffnut continued, even as she waved a hand to stop Clarke saying anything. "We do _everything_ together, we _always_ have! Look, I refuse to spend the rest of my life doing anything alone. Do you hear me?!"  
  
"You always were the strong one," Tuffnut said, a slight sob in his voice. "Mom should have named _you_ Tuffnut…"  
  
"But she didn't," Ruffnut said, stepping forward as Clarke moved to the side to let the two siblings talk. "She named _you_ Tuff. I'm begging you! And you know how much I hate to beg, just get down from there!"  
  
"It's too late to stop the metamorphasis, can you not see what I've become?" Tuffnut protested, before letting out a twisted roar.  
  
"Tuff, stop!" Hiccup suddenly yelled as the other Riders appeared on their dragons behind the two girls, "There is no metamorphasis, alright? You are _not_ turning into a dragon. Fishlegs, pelase tell him!"  
  
"It's true!" Fishlegs said. "We found the cave of the Lycanwing; it was just a myth to keep people away from- keep people away!"  
  
Clarke briefly noted the way Fishlegs corrected himself and stopped reaching into a pocket when he saw her, but chose not to press the issue; if there was anything the Riders were keeping secret, she had enough faith in them by now to believe that it wasn't anything dangerous to her personally.  
  
"No," Tuffnut shook his head. "No! I don't believe you. Look at me. I'm hideous, I'm terrifying!"  
  
"Tuff!" Astrid protested. "You're _not_ hideous! Terrifying at times, yes. Hideous? No."  
  
"Well, then how do you explain _this_?" Tuffnut brandished his arm-wound. "Can't do it, can you, hm?"  
  
"Just because we haven't found anything yet-!" Clarke tried to protest.  
  
"That's what I thought," Tuffnut ignored her. "Now, it's time to fly!"  
  
"Wait wait wait wait!" Snotlout yelled, dragging a large bag onto the cliff. "Wait! I can explain! I can explain it!"  
  
"Whoa, you don't look great," Tuffnut observed.  
  
"And that's with me treating his last few injuries; imagine how bad he'd be if I _wasn't_ here…" Clarke put in.  
  
"Uh, Snotlout?" Hiccup asked. "What do you have in that bag?"  
  
"I have what did _this_!" Snotlout said, brandishing his right arm with a similar wound to the one on Tuffnut's left.  
  
"Ah!" Tuffnut yelled. "The Lycanwing got him too! Save yourselves!"  
  
"It's _not_ a Lycanwing," Snotlout said indignantly. "It's not even a dragon! It's a wolf, and I caught him. You're not turning into a dragon, Tuff."  
  
"Wolf?" Clarke repeated in surprise before looking at the rest of the Riders. "We never looked into whether this place has _wolves_?"  
  
"Something to kick ourselves about later," Hiccup observed, even as his shaking head told Clarke he was kicking himself about that oversight as well. "The point is that you're _not_ turning into a dragon, as we've been trying to tell you…"  
  
"I'm not?" Tuffnut grinned.  
  
"Exactly!" Snotlout said. "I just made you _think_ you're turning into a dragon; it's funny, but it's not true."  
  
A broad grin on his face, Tuffnut stepped away from the ledge, only for the stone below him to suddenly break and fall away. Tuffnut fell backwards with a loud yell, but Toothless lunged past Hiccup and grabbed the Viking's leg in his toothless mouth. The dragon easily hauled Tuffnut back onto the ledge to reveal that the Viking was holding Chicken's foreleg in one hand, talking to the small bird in relief.  
  
"Oh, thank Thor," Hiccup sighed as Toothless pulled the young Viking back onto the main island, before Ruffnut ran up to hug her brother from behind.  
  
"Oh, I know what you're gonna say," Tuffnut said with a warm tone. "You realized how much you love me, you were scared, you were gonna lose me, and I better never do that again."  
  
"Actually, I was just going to tell you what an idiot you are," his sister responded before she turned her brother around. "Come here."  
  
Watching the twins hug, Clarke thought she saw Ruffnut's mouth move as though as she was saying something to the chicken behind her brother…  
  
"Uh, Snotlout?" Hiccup said, drawing her attention to other matters. "Where's the wolf?"  
  
Snotlout barely had time to turn around before a grey wolf had leapt from the bushes and was biting down on his arm once again. Lost for anything better to do, Clarke grabbed the wolf's outstretched tail and desperately pulled at it, the wolf releasing its grip on Snotlout's arm as it let out a loud yelp of shock before Astrid slammed the broad end of her axe into the top of the wolf's head, knocking it out before it could get its teeth back into the short Viking's arm.  
  
"Nice move," Astrid nodded at Clarke.  
  
"You too," Clarke smiled back.  
  
"You can't just-!" Snotlout began.  
  
"We're not killing a dumb animal because you were stupid enough to get close to it," Clarke cut him off as she indicated the wolf. "Griffin and I can take this thing somewhere else so we won't have to deal with it again; you won't have to worry about it again."  
  
"And we can do a check around the island tomorrow to make sure there aren't any more wolves here who might bother us," Hiccup added. "We can give Snot a day or two to recover while the rest of us take Gobber to take a better look at Clarke's ship to collect some of the remaining metal; he could offer a few other ideas about how we could transport and use that stuff."  
  
"Sounds good," Clarke nodded at Hiccup before looking around at the Vikings with a smile. "By the way, guys… thanks for including me in all that."  
  
"Huh?" Snotlout asked.  
  
"You were speaking… traders' tongue for me, right?" Clarke clarified.  
  
"Oh, yeah, no problem," Tuffnut shrugged.  
  
"Just so long as you _are_ trying to pick up our language in return," Astrid pointed out with a brief glare at Clarke.  
  
"Of course," Clarke nodded. "Just… maybe give me a few specific lessons and I'm sure I'll get my head around it all soon."  
  
She was fairly sure she'd followed a few of Tuffnut's ramblings earlier where she would have been completely clueless if she'd met them just after the dropship landed- he'd definitely said something about his senses coming alive and contemplating how Fishlegs would taste if his dragon-self tried to eat him- but it was probably time she started getting a few more explicit lessons on that front…


	14. Gobber's Secret Knowledge

"So," Gobber said thoughtfully as he looked up at Arrow Station, "this is what your people travelled in?"

"Well, I didn't spend much time in this part of it myself, but it's pretty typical of it all, yeah," Clarke nodded from her position beside the blacksmith. Once Tuffnut and Snotlout had each been confirmed to be healthy after their recent attacks, Gobber had taken a look over the metal the Riders had gathered from Arrow Station and affirmed his agreement that the metal had potential if it was heated in the right manner. Gobber had initially just been willing to see about helping Hiccup go over the available metal to start making a few new weapons for the Riders, but when he'd learned that there was more metal available, he had expressed an interest in going back to see what the ship was like.

Hiccup had taken a day or so to focus on finishing Griffin's saddle while Gobber did some early work with the metal samples he'd gathered so far, and Clarke had to admit that it was far more comfortable flying around on a dragon with the saddle rather than just riding on his bare back. With Ruffnut staying at the Edge to keep an eye on Tuffnut and Snotlout taking a few days off to confirm that he had recovered from his time as a test subject, Gobber had been allowed to 'borrow' Hookfang when the group went to take another look at the remains of Arrow Station.

At the moment, Hookhang and Griffin were assisting Hiccup, Astrid, Fishlegs and their dragons in breaking the station up even further, while Gobber and Clarke watched from further down the beach to guard the nets they'd gathered to collect the metal once they'd finished. Gobber had already estimated that it would take a couple of trips to bring the remaining metal from the station back, allowing for how some of the metal would be destroyed by the dragons blasting or melting it, so the current plan was to get a suitable amount of metal together for Astrid and Clarke to take back to the Edge in the first load, while the other riders and dragons finished breaking down the rest of it.

It wasn't the way Clarke had imagined sharing the resources of the Ark with the people on the Ground, but when Arrow Station wouldn't have had much in the way of useful technology even if it had come down intact, she supposed that she should just be content that she was able to share anything at all with her new friends beyond her own attempts at medical assistance. Weapons might have been the first thought of most of the Riders when she introduced the idea of new metal to the equation, but she had faith that Hiccup and the others wouldn't use those weapons to go after her people.

Besides… after seeing how Finn had managed to slaughter eighteen innocent people because he had a gun and was facing a culture with no way to counter his weapons, Clarke would frankly be content if she never had to worry about guns again. The Riders might have dragons or bows and arrows, but at least bows and arrows couldn't kill people if they were in the hands of unskilled fighters, and dragons wouldn't be indiscriminate killers in the same sense as Finn had been.

 _What does it say about us when I have more faith in animals than I do in my own people_?

Watching as Griffin fired a burst of hot air against a loose piece of metal to knock it off its last support, Clarke felt ashamed at the thought; Griffin might not be able to talk, but he wasn't an 'animal' in the traditional sense. From the moment she'd met him by Arrow Station, she'd never had any doubt that he wasn't going to hurt her, all of the Riders' dragons were warm and friendly, and even that Titan Wing Monstrous Nightmare had only been focused on defending its territory rather than attacking any of them…

"So, lass," Gobber broke the silence as he looked at Clarke in a more probing manner than anything Clarke had expected of the large man after his stories of the Lycanwing, "can I presume you're from the sky-islands?"

"The what?" Clarke looked at Gobber in surprise before she tried to play up her sense of confusion. "What are you- I don't-?"

"Come now, lass," Gobber smiled at her, "I'm not going ter say I know everything about those old legends, but there are a few stories among Bork's papers that mentions what the world was like before the dragons ran rampant. Details are a little tricky, I grant ye, and we're still not sure how literal some of 'em are, but those tales include quite a bit of talk about how we used ter have homes and outposts that flew far above anything even the dragons are capable of."

"They do?" Clarke asked, her initial idea to deny Gobber's question forgotten in the face of this new information.

_He knows what came before?_

"Nothing too detailed, obviously, but the knowledge has been passed down for some time in the right circles," Gobber explained, looking up at the riders as they continued to work away at the metal around the former space station's upper levels before he focused his attention back on Clarke. "And since ye haven't told these young warriors anythin' 'bout your past yet, thought I'd bring it up meself an' see what ye had to say."

"It's… not that I was hiding it to be secret or anything, I just… I didn't know if you'd believe any of it," Clarke began to tentatively explain. "I mean, none of the riders ever mentioned they had any kind of idea what Arrow Station really was when I brought them here before, and after what happened last time…"

"Last time?"

"I… before I met you all, I met another group further inland from here, and… well, it wasn't just because of where we came from, but things with our groups… didn't go well," Clarke shrugged, before she looked back at Gobber. "What do you know about… well, the world before the dragons?"

"Just a few points," Gobber shrugged, even as he looked at Clarke in a contemplative manner. "Like I said, Bork's papers don't go into much detail about what everything was like before things went wrong, but there was apparently some kind o'… massive catastrophe that ended up letting the dragons go loose an' start bein' such a problem in the first place."

"That… makes sense," Clarke nodded tentatively. She wasn't ready to tell any of the Riders that the dragons had been genetically engineered, even if their culture probably wouldn't even understand the concept of something like that, but if Gobber had this much information it might be worth seeing what else he knew about the world before. "It was a bit more… complicated than that, from what I know from my peoples' own tales, but to be fair we didn't even know that there was _anyone_ left on the ground before a few months ago."

"The ground?" Gobber looked at Clarke with new intensity, even as his gaze shifted back to study Arrow Station. "So… we're not talkin' 'bout floating islands, are we? This ship o' yours… it flew?"

"Sort of," Clarke said, mind racing over the best way to explain things; Gobber might be aware of the basic idea that there was some advanced world that was destroyed by some big disaster, but she had to keep in mind that he probably didn't have the scientific background to understand how some things worked. "What you're looking at was basically part of a larger structure that could… well, think of it like a ship that could stay in the sky without needing to land, and my people lived there for the better part of a century."

"You lived in the sky?"

"Basically, yeah," Clarke nodded.

"So… if you people used ter live in the sky…" Gobber looked tentatively at Clarke. "I mean, Hiccup mentioned that yeh told him ye left yer people after helping them find a new place ter live; can I assume that new place would be… well, the ground? As in, you're new ter Midgard itself?"

"…Yeah," Clarke nodded tentatively; Norse mythology wasn't a strong point for her, but those Marvel movies definitely referred to Earth as 'Midgard' more than once. "Basically, our ship couldn't stay up there any more because things were just starting to break down, so we… a few of us were sent on ahead to make sure everything was survivable, and then we had a few bad encounters with the locals…"

"Who live somewhere out there, I'm guessing?" Gobber indicated the forest further inland.

"A good couple of weeks' walk from here, anyway; I don't know how far that would be by dragon."

"And ye didn't think o' goin' back?"

"I…" Clarke began, before she solemnly shook her head. "No."

"No?"

"I… I had to get away," Clarke said, clenching her fists to maintain control of herself as she spoke, trying to look everywhere but in Gobber's direction. "Everything went wrong… so many innocent people… I kept on trying to save everyone, and people just kept on… either they died or they blamed me for not doing something else that I _knew_ wouldn't have worked and they wouldn't let me explain…"

She broke off, not trusting herself to say anything else without losing control at the moment, and looked over with a smile to where the red-and-orange Windstriker was flying alongside Stormfly, tearing at the molten metal with its claws after the Nadder had melted it more directly. "And then I met Griffin, and it was like there was something on the ground that I could actually care about that _wouldn't_ just end up turning on me because I didn't live up to their standards… something that I could protect and help who wouldn't start complaining because I can't be perfect…"

"Had it rough back home, eh?"

" _That_ is putting it mildly," Clarke observed with a bitter smile. "I mean, I'm not saying I did a perfect job, but there has to be a line between completely accepting my decisions and hating me for making them when it's too late…"

"Eh, leaders never have it easy," Gobber smiled slightly at her, before his expression became more solemn. "But… if you think you left your people in a safe state… we've been trustin' these kids with operations on the Edge when they're our best Riders, so I can't exactly criticise ye for decidin' ter try an' do somethin' else after doing so much for yer people."

"Thanks-" Clarke began.

" _If_ ye're sure ye've done everything ye can for 'em," Gobber said. "I spent so much time treating Hiccup like he was doin' fine when he was growin' up 'cause I never stopped to really _look_ at what he needed ter be, an' just told him what he needed ter be rather than try and help him find some kind o' middle ground…"

"Huh," Clarke said, lost for a better response as she looked uncertainly at the two-limbed man. "So… you think I should go back?"

"I think ye should think 'bout whether your people need ye there or not," the blacksmith observed. "Ye could prob'ly do with the chance to just be responsible for yerself for a time if ye were a leader back home- Thor knows even Stoick appreciates some time away from Berk these days- but just think 'bout if you're staying away because ye don't want ter go back or if ye're sure they don't need ye any more."

Clarke just stood in silence for a moment, before Griffin broke the silence by flying over to land beside her, nuzzling his head against her with a warm rumble that prompted Clarke to give him a brief hug around his horn.

The talk with Gobber might not have given her anything particularly new, but at least she'd been given some sign that this culture had something to do with the original cataclysm, and it had been… nice… to talk about her past with someone.

It wasn't that Gobber hadn't made some interesting points, but she just… she'd been through so much since she got to the ground, and nobody back at the Ark actually _wanted_ her any more; Wells was dead, her father was dead, her mother didn't understand her, her old friends all hated her for various reasons, Lexa had betrayed her…

Wasn't it just better for everyone back on the Ark if she just left them all alone and stayed with the Riders to explore her fresh start?


	15. Blondes on Love

Watching Hiccup work away at the metal they'd retrieved from Arrow Station in his forge, Clarke wished that she'd taken the time to learn more about the grounders dealt with that kind of work before she'd left Camp Jaha.

Frankly, when she looked back, she was ashamed to realise that she'd spent so much of her time associating with the grounders thinking of them only as warriors or hunters. She was aware when she stopped to think about it that there obviously had to be more to their culture than that, consider that weapons and medicines didn't exactly make themselves, but it had just been simpler for her and the rest of the Hundred to 'pigeon-hole' everyone on the other side at first, and when an alliance had seemed like a good idea she'd only been focusing on the Grounders' warriors and Lexa.

Maybe she was being petty about it, but the more she learned about these people, the more Clarke appreciated her decision to stay with them for more than the fact that she wasn't expected to 'take charge' any more. Her own people had been too judgemental and focused on themselves, the Grounders were too mistrusting, but Hiccup and the Riders were so open… so willing to explore new ideas…

There were still questions about where they fit in to the wider history of this world, of course, but what Gobber had told her about the history of the other islands in the Archipelago had helped Clarke work out a few more points about what had happened after the missiles went off. Obviously Gobber didn't know everything, considering that he was looking at this from the perspective of someone who'd basically been raised in a variation of Viking culture, but Clarke was increasingly certain that these people were descendants of the Dragon Sanctuary's final guests. When the nuclear holocaust went off, Clarke guessed that those survivors had somehow fallen back on the Viking lifestyle that was part of the role-playing-game theme certain guests had enjoyed taking part in while they were at the park. Gobber had even mentioned a few old tales about past attempts to train dragons, such as how the Berserker Tribe had managed to 'harness' electricity-generating dragons known as the Skrill and use them as weapons, so it looked like some knowledge had been retained for a time after the bombs went off even if it was somehow lost later.

 _Then again, from what Dad told me, only a few people at the sanctuary were meant to have any actual_ training _in how to handle the dragons; maybe the official trainers had to leave for some reason and the dragons ran riot when they didn't come back_ …

There were obviously still details Clarke needed to work out before she had a complete timeline of events, but the fact that Gobber knew _anything_ about the real past had at least given her something to work with. His references to their village having a history going back seven generations felt a bit off, but Clarke was willing to guess that was because the original survivors just fell back on the idea that the settlement was their true history to stop people mourning what they'd lost.

_Maybe not the best approach, but when everything falls apart people probably take what they can get…_

"What's up?"

"Nothing," Clarke said, looking back to see that Astrid was the one who'd spoken, the other blonde standing alongside her. "Just… I was thinking about things."

"About Hiccup?"

"Hicc- _oh_ ," Clarke said, recognising the implications of the other girl's tone with an apologetic smile, relieved that she was for once in this position and able to confirm that she hadn't done anything. "No, not like that; he's a good guy, but it's just…"

She shook her head with a tentative smile. "I don't know; I think he's just… it might sound weird, but Hiccup's almost _too_ good."

"Too good?" Astrid looked sceptically at Clarke.

"It's like…" Clarke waved a hand uncertainly, briefly trying to think of a good analogy before she decided not to get into the cultural context debate on top of everything else. "Well, Hiccup and I both want to make the world a better place, but if we're going to do that, we need someone to remind us that it's not always going to be that simple or we'll just get lost in our own idealism."

It was a frustrating thing to acknowledge about herself, but Clarke had to face facts. Whatever else she felt about Lexa, the Commander had been right that there would have been no way to save that village from the missile attack without compromising Bellamy's role in the mountain, and she would have wasted time trying to find another way if Lexa hadn't been there to make her face the facts.

"Really?" Astrid looked at Clarke in a probing manner. "So you… I mean…?"

"I'm fine just being friends," Clarke smiled at Astrid, guessing what the other girl wasn't saying. "Don't get me wrong, I like Hiccup, and he's the first guy I've met for a while I feel like I could genuinely like and respect as a leader, but I just… this might sound like a weird thing to _not_ like about someone, but he reminds me too much of my best friend growing up."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"Wells was basically my brother as far as I'm concerned; he might have _wanted_ more, but… well, like I said, he was the closest thing I had to a brother, so I just never saw him that way," Clarke concluded, smiling wistfully at the memory. She might regret that she couldn't have returned Wells' feelings, but she could look back at her time with him and appreciate that he'd tried to be a good man in difficult circumstances. "So don't worry; you're safe."

"Safe?" Astrid looked at Clarke in surprise.

"Come on, Astrid," Clarke smiled reassuringly at her, "I'm not an expert at relationships, but it doesn't take an expert to know that you and Hiccup have _something_ going on; you're always sitting together when we have our meetings, you visit him during the days when there's nothing else on-"

"You _saw_ that?"

"I _am_ staying in the watchtower these days; I may not have seen any ships yet, but I've seen _some_ things," Clarke pointed out. "Look, if you don't want to tell me anything-"

"It's not that; it's…" Astrid began, looking around for a moment before she grabbed Clarke's arm and led her briskly to the stables, where Stormfly and Griffin were currently having a nap while Toothless was with Hiccup and the other riders were out on patrol. Demonstrating a strength that surprised Clarke given Astrid's slight build, the other girl pulled the door shut behind them before she turned to look uncertainly at Clarke.

"Look," the other blonde said awkwardly, "I wouldn't normally do this, but there's not really anyone else I can talk to about it, so… can you keep this between us?"

"You can't talk about this to _anyone_ else?" Clarke asked in surprise.

"I mean, I obviously can't talk to any of the guys about this, I'm not sure how seriously Ruffnut would take it if I tried to talk to her, I have… I don't really know anyone my age back home who'd get why this is an issue, and it would just be awkward if I asked any of our parents…"

"I get it," Clarke smiled in understanding at her fellow blonde before looking more seriously at Astrid. "So what's the problem?"

"Well… you remember how Hiccup commented on that 'gesture to all of me' thing you did when he learned he's the son of our chief?"

"Yeah…" Clarke said, recalling something else Hiccup had said around that time. "And didn't he mention something about his father used to act like he wanted Hiccup to be… I think the term was 'a smart Snotlout'?"

"That's… pretty accurate, really," Astrid said, the blonde looking almost shamefaced. "You see, before we started dragon training, Hiccup was… well, there's a reason for his name."

"There is?"

"Back on Berk, a 'hiccup' was basically… well, the runt."

“Ah,” Clarke said, suddenly recalling Hiccup mentioning that detail to her back when they first met. She didn’t think that kind of naming tradition had ever been part of Viking culture in real life, but comparing Hiccup to some of the Vikings she’d read about, she could see how the term applied. “So calling him that when he was born is basically the equivalent of saying he’s not going to be… well, the average Viking?”

"Yeah," Astrid nodded. "He was assigned to be Gobber's apprentice in the forge because it was basically somewhere he could stay out of trouble, and back when we were at war with the dragons, he spent most of his time trying to make new weapons or gadgets, or just trying to find _some_ way that he could help beyond sharpening the swords…"

"I take it that didn't go well?"

"It basically became village policy to try and keep Hiccup locked up whenever there was a dragon raid taking place, and the twins and Snotlout teased him about it for ages… and I just…" Astrid trailed off and sighed sadly. "I know that Hiccup _liked_ me before everything changed after he trained Toothless, but when I look back… how much of that was just because I was the only person who didn't really _do_ anything to him when we were kids?" The usually strong young woman suddenly struck Clarke as being almost fragile as Astrid continued speaking, looking at the floor as though she didn't want Clarke to see her full expression. "I mean, before Dragon Training, Snotlout and the twins picked on him mercilessly and Fishlegs just stayed away from him because he was worried spending time with Hiccup would get him in trouble; I never picked on him, and I didn't blatantly avoid him, but I never really _acknowledged_ him either!"

"Hiccup isn't an idiot; I don't think he'd be interested in you just because you were the only person not to treat him like he was useless-"

"But how do I _know_ that?" Astrid said, looking at Clarke with a sudden sense of vulnerability. "How can I be sure that he won't just… wake up and realise that I'm just the one person he knew who didn't pick on him that much? I mean, I like Heather now, but when she showed up it didn't take that long for all the guys to be basically falling over themselves to tell her what she wanted to know because she was just being kind and keen to talk to everyone about dragons; what if that's what he wants?"

"The girl who just listens to everything he has to say?" Clarke asked with a brief smile. "I don't think so."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because leaders never just want people who'll listen to them," Clarke smiled, glad that her leader experience was proving useful beyond forcing her to give people orders. "I spent time trying to be a leader back home, and… well, I'm not saying that it was always easy, and there were times when I wished they wouldn't just keep _defying_ me- sometimes I think they rejected my ideas just because they didn't like me without thinking about the points I was trying to bring up- but I was always willing to listen to what they had to say. From what I've seen of you and Hiccup, you're good together that way; you each offer a different perspective on a situation, but at the same time you encourage each other to be better than you were without immediately trying to shoot down the other person's idea just because it's not the way you do things."

"You think?" Astrid asked, looking at Clarke with an expression that mixed the gleam of tears with a strange hint of hope.

"Like I said, I'm not exactly a relationship expert, but I can tell you that we can never exactly _choose_ who we… develop feelings for," Clarke pointed out. "Wells had feelings for me for years, but I honestly never saw him as anything more than a friend even if he was my _best_ friend, and then he died after we were sent on ahead to scout out the area because a traumatised girl couldn't cope with what his father had done…"

"Oh," Astrid looked at Clarke with a more shameful expression. "I… I'm sorry I-"

"Let me finish," Clarke cut her off, giving Astrid a reassuring smile. "My first serious potential relationship since I… left my people… went wrong when I learned that he had a girlfriend, and the fact that he thought he wouldn't see her again didn't make me feel any better about it. I spent the next few weeks feeling like we were stuck in some freaky limbo thing, where I was trying to deal with my feelings and make friends with his other partner, and then _he_ ended up dead too after he killed a bunch of people looking for me. After all that, I ended up falling for the local leader of the natives in our new territory when we entered into an alliance to deal with our latest threat, but we agreed to put our feelings to the side until the current threat was over, and then they just betrayed _my_ people to save theirs…"

"Gods," Astrid looked more sympathetically at Clarke. "I… look, you didn't have to-"

"I'm telling you this because I _want_ to tell you," Clarke cut Astrid off once again. "My point is that I made all kinds of bad relationship choices before I came here, and I don't think I'll ever stop regretting every one of them, but Hiccup… if he's been your friend for years and he still looks at you that way, if you feel anything for him, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot."

"Even if he's just settling-"

"If he's still showing interest in you after this long when other people actually like him these days, I think you don't need to worry about that," Clarke smiled reassuringly at Astrid. "I get why you're scared, but the only reason I regret my past relationships is that the other party let me down; from what I've seen of Hiccup, I think the last thing he'd ever even _think_ of doing is let _you_ down."

Astrid's expression was still tentative, but as she looked at Clarke with a hopeful smile, Clarke allowed herself a moment to hope in return. She didn't think that Astrid was going to dive into anything right away- the other girl clearly had some deep-rooted relationship issues that weren't going to be resolved just from this one talk- but from the wistful smile on Astrid's face as she walked out of the stables and looked up at the image of a Night Fury painted above the doors, Clarke had a feeling Astrid would have that talk with Hiccup soon enough.

 _Maybe, for once, someone can have a_ better _relationship because I got involved…_

It was a small step by most standards, but Clarke would take any kind of win in this twisted situation.


	16. The Dragons of the Dark

With the other Riders off on one of their mysterious raids and the twins taking part in some kind of training flight that seemed to be focused on how much gas Barf could produce in the sky, Clarke was left to wander the rest of the island with only Griffin for company. She was under orders not to actually get on her dragon and try to fly anywhere, but she appreciated that she was being given greater freedom the longer she stayed with the other Riders, rather than still being treated as the outsider.

She wasn't sure if that talk with Astrid had prompted the other girl to speak up on her behalf, but Clarke had been watching the other girl whenever she saw Astrid along with Hiccup, and she wasn't entirely surprised to see that Astrid kept on getting just that little bit closer to the one-legged Viking whenever she could find a reason to do so. She didn't think either Hiccup or Astrid had actually told each other how they felt yet, but Clarke wasn't going to judge them for waiting a bit to take that final step; her own relationship experience might suck, but you didn't have to be experienced to know that basically forcing others to be happy wasn't a good idea.

That said, even if she missed having someone to talk to, she actually liked the fact that the other Riders had left her relatively alone on the Edge. The twins might be nearby if she tried to fly away, but it was as though leaving her like this was a sign that they trusted her enough not to do anything on the island itself. After taking a moment to grab a couple of chairs and other small items of furniture from outside the huts and move them up to the top of her tower for the future, Clarke found herself taking a brief look at the open doors of each hut, smiling at such details as the water trough beside Snotlout's hut, the double doors of the twin's hut, the simple interior of Fishleg's with a rock pool off to the side, and Astrid's metallic hut filled with all kinds of weapons.

When she reached Hiccup's hut, Clarke wasn't entirely surprised to see the range of alternate tail-fins for Toothless laid out on the walls, and thought she saw a small hatch in the floor, but her attention was soon caught by two objects positioned on a kind of 'hatstand' in one corner of the room. Briefly pausing in thought, Clarke decided to ignore her old rule to stay outside and nipped into the hut to take a closer look at the stand, her eyes widening as she realised just what she was looking at.

"Wings…" she whispered, reaching out to touch the large pair of cogs at the top of one set of wings on the stand. Moving her fingers along the cogs to the long rods at either end, Clarke held out the rods at one end of the set-up and confirmed her initial assessment that this design must have been based on Toothless's artificial tail-fin, the rods locking into position once the wings had been spread out as appropriate and slipping back into position once she adjusted them appropriately. The second set was a simpler design, as it was just a couple of large bits of leather with straps on one end and a couple of short chains on the other. For a moment Clarke wasn't entirely sure if it was another set of wings or something else, but she soon worked out that the straps must be intended to go around the wearer's arms while the chains somehow attached to the user's feet, and it even looked as though the wings could basically fold up onto the wearer's back until he needed to use them.

"Nice," she nodded in approval at the two wingsuits, before she glanced back at Griffin. "You have to admire Hiccup, really; he might think he's from a thousand years ago, but without professional equipment to work from, this stuff is brilliant by _any_ definition…"

She trailed off slightly as she saw Griffin looking at her with an almost sarcastic expression. "Hey, I'm not saying I _like_ him like that, but I'm allowed to admire a guy as a leader and inventor without wanting to… _do_ stuff with him, you know?"

She still wasn't sure just how intelligent Griffin was in that context, but the way the dragon chuckled slightly at her was enough to assure her that he at least understood that she was trying to be flippant about the situation, even if she wasn't sure if he even understood the implication that she might be attracted to Hiccup in the first place. Returning to her original plans, Clarke walked along the paths around the Edge for a few moments before she turned off to head into the woods around the compound, soon settling into a comfortable pace as she walked through the woods, Griffin walking alongside her.

The sun was in the sky, the air was warm and refreshing, there were a few birds singing, her dragon paced peacefully alongside her… Clarke didn't think she'd had a truly peaceful walk through the woods since…

God, even her _first_ walk along Earth hadn't been this relaxing; she'd been so worried about what she might find that she hadn't been able to appreciate the beauty of it, and after that every time she'd gone out she'd had to keep an eye out for Grounders or Mountain Men or wild animals…

What did it say about the life she lived that she'd had to go all the way to a small island inhabited by dragons to find a place on Earth where she could go out and just be sure that she was safe to relax?

_And I never would have found this if Griffin hadn't called out while I was at Arrow Station…_

"It's… nice here, isn't it?" she looked over at Griffin with a warm smile, suddenly overcome by a sense of gratitude towards her dragon. "We're safe from random attacks, we're both making friends, nobody's actively looking for me, you're not a 'special' target of the dragon hunters, and I'm learning more about how to… well, help you?"

Griffin nudged her with his head and let out the low rumble that Clarke had chosen to interpret as him approving of her efforts to take care of him.

"Thanks," Clarke rubbed his horn; scratching him under his chin triggered some kind of nerve that made most dragons just fall over, but the horn-scratch just seemed to be something he liked. "And… well, is it selfish of me to like the fact that someone else was in charge when I got here?"

This time Clarke was _sure_ Griffin looked at her with a quizzical expression in his eyes after that last comment.

"I mean," Clarke said, waving a hand as she looked at her dragon, "I ended up becoming a leader for my people before we met because it seemed like I was the only one who really appreciated the scale of the problems facing us, but here… I get that I don't know everything they're dealing with here, but it's like Hiccup's already dealt with most of the problems and he's not the kind of guy to create new ones…"

She was interrupted when she heard a sound coming from behind her, spinning around to see a cave in the cliff. Glancing over at Griffin, she grabbed a broken branch and walked carefully into the cave, the dragon close behind her, before she pulled out a small flint and struck a few sparks to light the branch. After walking a few metres into the cave, passing a range of stalagmites she soon saw a pair of small dragons circling around on the ground in front of her, each about the size of a dog, with red eyes and a large mouth, putting her in mind of a short-necked, smooth-backed, smaller version of Griffin. The two dragons looked at her with an expression that she could only think of as caution, their lips curled back as though they were about to snarl even as they didn't actually seem to be making a particular sound.

"Uh… hi?" Clarke said at last, holding back the hand holding her burning branch to silence Griffin as she looked cautiously at the other dragons; judging by the way they flinched, she guessed they didn't like light that much. "I'm… Clarke; this is… Griffin."

The small dragons were still letting out a cautious growling sound as they looked at her, but they seemed to be willing to wait rather than attack. After a few moments of staring uncertainly at each other, the dragons turned and moved briskly back into the shadowy rear of the cave, Clarke moving cautiously after the dragons until she saw a sword impaled in the ground nearby.

Clarke appreciated that she was probably just letting herself get distracted by the sheer 'cool' factor of what she was looking at here, but even a casual glance at the sword made it clear that it was an impressive weapon. There were fine golden runes carved into the handle and along the blade, and the leather wrapped around the handle was very well-preserved, assuming that one of the other Riders hadn't left the weapon here for some reason. Reaching out to the sword, Clarke placed her hand on the hilt and pulled at it for a few moments, but the blade proved to be resistant to her efforts. After studying it for a moment, Clarke glanced back at Griffin with an inquiring smile.

"Could you…?" she began, indicating the weapon in the ground. Actually appearing to nod in understanding, Griffin walked up and tugged on the sword while scratching at the ground with his claws, his own powerful neck and jaw muscles forcing the sword out of the ground with relative ease. Grabbing the blade between her palms, Clarke took the weapon from her dragon and grabbed it by the hilt, giving the blade a couple of experimental swings before she held it up in front of her.

" _Nice_ ," she decided, nodding in approval at the weapon before she glanced down thoughtfully at herself for a moment before pulling her old holster out of her inner jacket pocket (she couldn't even remember what had happened to her gun after Arrow Station), hung it back on her hip, and forced the sword into it. As she'd hoped, the blade cut through the bottom of the holster with sufficient force, but left the main body of the holster intact enough for Clarke to be fairly sure the sword wouldn't just slip out at a moment's notice.

Looking beyond the sword, Clarke noted the small dragons she'd seen earlier at the bottom of a sudden incline. Mentally judging the distance, Clarke 'skidded' down the floor with her torch in one hand, raising the light when her hand brushed over some kind of carving. Her torch was bright enough to reveal that there was a strange collection of runes carved on the walls. For a moment Clarke wondered where the dragons had gone, but the sight of another, deeper pit beyond the runes answered that question.

As soon as she was on Griffin's back, the dragon leapt down to the bottom of the pit, landing with cat-like grace in an even darker part of the caves. A brief search was enough to reveal the presence of more of the strange white dragons, but a loud roar from Griffin was enough to make the new dragons back off.

"OK, easy…" Clarke said, reaching into her pocket to pull out a few small strips of something that put her in mind of tales of beef jerky, tossing them onto the ground in front of the dragons. The dragons sniffed at the meat uncertainly for a moment before one of them took a bite from the meat in front of it, followed by the rest of the dragons doing the same. The group seemed to smile at her, but then moved aside as Clarke walked further into the cave, the torch raised as Clarke studied the area. Looking around, Clarke noted a small assortment of boxes and other basic furniture, including a couple of old lamps and worn-looking books, with a stone throne against one wall that suggested to Clarke that this had been some kind of outpost before it was abandoned.

"Nice place you've got here," Clarke said, smiling tentatively at the dragons as she looked around the cave. She didn't know if this place had developed over time or been part of the storyline of one of the park's old games before the apocalypse, but right now her bigger question was finding out more about this cave. Following the path to a large entrance area at the other end, Clarke found herself in a significantly larger cavern.

"OK, now this is _really_ nice," she observed, raising the torch to get a better look at the scale of the area. She appreciated that a flaming stick didn't give a good sense of the area as a whole, but-

Her thoughts were cut off when the sun came in through a small hole in the ceiling, illuminating a far larger cavern while prompting a range of snarls and screeches from the dragons as they retreated from the light.

"Ah," she said in understanding. "That's why you're all hiding out back there, right? The light's too bright for your nocturnal vision…"

Glancing up at the hole, Clarke made a few mental calculations before she slung her legs back over Griffin and directed the dragon towards the hole. The Windstriker had to give his wings a couple of powerful beats to reach the roof, but once he came in close enough he quickly folded his wings against his sides and dived through the hole, spreading them as soon as he was outside the cave and turning in the air. Observing the location of the hole, Clarke made a few mental notes before she turned Griffin around to head back towards the Edge.

Once she reached the outpost, Clarke got off the dragon and headed for a pile of wood off to the side of the training arena that had been previously pointed out to her as the place where the other riders kept supplies for potential repairs. Based on her look at the hole when she'd left the cave and her knowledge of Griffin's size, it wasn't hard for Clarke to pick out a few appropriately-sized bits of wood that she could use to create a suitable hatch, and the Riders had even left a simple saw, hammer and nails lying near the pile that she could use to do the rest of the work.

_Not sure if any of this is historically accurate or not, but I'm not going to complain about any of it…_

She had a brief concern when it came to the question of whether she should fix the hatch in place or not, but was spared that concern when she found an interesting-looking collection of cogs and levers that put her in mind of devices she'd seen in Hiccup's hut in particular, along with some of the features in the interior of the dome. She would need to take a few bits of rope to be sure that she could get the right length set up in the end, but if she was right about just how intelligent the dragons were…

A curious rumble from Griffin prompted Clarke to look up as Barf and Belch came in to land beside her, the twins getting off to look curiously at her work.

"What's all this about?" Tuffnut looked uncertainly at her. "Trying to be Hiccup on top of being our Gothi?"

"…No," Clarke shook her head, deciding not to question what 'Gothi' was a reference to. "I'm just trying to put something together to… actually, I think I've got it all sorted here for the most part; if you give me a few moments, I might be able to show you what I found."

* * *

"And there are dragons in there?" Ruffnut looked at the hole in surprise.  
  
"Nocturnal dragons that can't move into this part of the cave because the sunlight panics them," Clarke explained, indicating the gear system as she adjusted the position of the newly-assembled hatch. "From what I've seen in your huts, if I've got this right, the dragons should be able to control the hatch at their end once I can train them in how to use the pulley system, and we've got the other switch here so that we can either go down there or bring them up if we need their help."  
  
" _Neat_ ," Tuffnut grinned as he looked down into the cave, before he looked over at Clarke. "And you came up with this yourself?"  
  
"Well, I watched a few friends put similar things together before I… came to the Edge," Clarke shrugged. "I wouldn't like to try and put something like this together on my own from scratch, but you had some interesting parts lying around in storage, and it's easier to put things together when someone else did the hard work."  
  
"How come we never found this place?" Ruffnut observed as she stuck her head through the hole before Clarke grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back. " _Hey_!"  
  
"Do you really want to risk getting a large wooden object in your back when you're standing over a drop like this?" Clarke pointed out, indicating the hatch in her hands. "Your dragon's too big to fit down there even if he wouldn't have to get the hatch open if that happened; I'd rather not have to tell Hiccup you got hurt because of me."  
  
"Eh, he'd get it," Tuffnut shrugged as his sister grinned nonchalantly.  
  
"Well _I_ wouldn't," Clarke countered. "I've already had one friend suffer a debilitating injury because I didn't think things through, so you're keeping your head out of that hole; clear?"  
  
"Uh… right," Ruffnut stepped back with a tentative nod as she stepped back to look over the hatch as Clarke held it in position. "So… you think this'll work?"  
  
"It's just a matter of adapting some of the features I've seen you use in your huts and put it together here; if we're right about the intelligence of the dragons, I think it should get the job done," Clarke nodded, assessing the position of the hatch. "I'll get a few iron nails to keep everything in place and then nip into the cave to set up the pulley system; if everything goes well, they should have more living space by tomorrow and still be able to get out for a flight when it's dark."  
  
"Hey guys!" a voice called out from above. Turning around, Clarke and the twins saw the other four Riders flying overhead, the four dragons landing a short distance down the hill so that their riders could walk up to join the others.  
  
"Raid go well?" Tuffnut asked.  
  
"We came, we saw, we kicked some ass," Snotlout grinned. "What did you expect?"  
  
"How about you guys?" Hiccup looked curiously around at the trio. "Is everything OK?"  
  
"All fine; just wondering what it says about us when Clarkie here found a whole nest of dragons living here that none of us knew about," Tuffnut said.  
  
"You did?" Fishlegs looked at her with a new grin.  
  
"I did," Clarke nodded, returning the grin before glancing over at Tuffnut with a cooler stare. "And for the record, _don't_ call me 'Clarkie'."  
  
"Check," Tuffnut held up his hands apologetically, before he looked over at Fishlegs and indicated the hole. "And from what I saw, whatever's in that cave looks like it's basically a bunch of white Night Terrors; wonder if Smidvarg left his siblings behind to join the black guys and they're all just stuck inside?"  
  
"Smidvarg?" Clarke looked between Fishlegs and Tuffnut curiously. "Night Terrors? Did I miss something?"  
  
"Oh, the Night Terrors were some of the original dragons here before we set up the Edge," Fishlegs explained with a grin. "You haven't seen them around because they've been patrolling other parts of the island, but they're basically part of our security system; they pretend to be giant dragons to drive off the smaller ones."  
  
"Ah," Clarke nodded. "Nice touch."  
  
"So you found a whole bunch of white Night Terrors in there?" Hiccup looked at her in surprise before fixing the hatch with a curious stare. "Wonder if Smidvarg was part of that group or he's just some kind of… odd one out…"  
  
"Something to look into later," Clarke observed. "Anyway, these dragons seem to basically be stuck in a small part of that cave because they were nocturnal and couldn't cope with the light from the crack, so I thought I'd set up something to cover the hole that they could open if they wanted."  
  
"You set that up?" Astrid asked in surprise as she studied the hatch.  
  
"I borrowed a few things from the workshop; I figured nobody would mind," Clarke explained.  
  
"Nice," Fishlegs nodded in approval as he examined the mechanism leading up to the chain. "Where did you find the cave?"  
  
"It's round the other side of the mountain," Clarke indicated the woods with a vague wave of her hand. "Just let me finish up here and I can show you where I found it."  
  
"Great!" Fishlegs grinned, quickly hurrying back down the hill to get back on Meatlug and flying off. Rolling his eyes, Snotlout walked back down to Hookfang and took the dragon into the air after Fishlegs, closely followed by the twins, leaving Clarke and Astrid exchanging glances as Hiccup examined the hatch.  
  
"This is… actually pretty good," he nodded in approval as he looked back at her. "I take it the chain and gear arrangement is so that the dragons can open it themselves?"  
  
"I'll sort it out once I get back down there, but do you think it works?"  
  
"Looks like it'll all fit together, really; how did you do it?"  
  
"Just adapted a few things I'd seen in your huts and then asked myself 'What Would Raven Do'?"  
  
"Raven?" Astrid asked.  
  
"A… friend from… before I found Griffin," Clarke said, suddenly struck by the notion that this was the first bit of specifically personal information she'd given any of the Riders about her life before joining them…  
  
"Talking of the workshop," she said, eager to turn the topic to something else, "I noticed that you had an interesting bit of work in your hut-?"  
  
"You were in his/my _hut_?" Astrid and Hiccup looked sharply at Clarke.  
  
"I just glanced through the door when I saw it was open and took a look at something that was already basically out in public; that's it," Clarke held up her hands reassuringly before she looked more curiously at Hiccup. "Anyway, when I was looking inside, I saw that… well, those wings you're making?"  
  
"Oh, you mean the Dragonfly?" Hiccup smiled.  
  
"That's… an interesting name," Clarke observed.  
  
"Oh, don't encourage him," Astrid said, even as the appreciative smile on her face showed that she admired Hiccup's skill. "We've had to talk him into a balance between exploring the idea and getting so caught up on it that he just ignores the risks…"  
  
"Hey, I got it working, didn't I?"  
  
"After more than a few crashes," Astrid observed with a wry smile before she looked back at Clarke. "He ended up having to get saved by Toothless because the original version was too rigid; it took a run-in with Speed Stingers to make him realise that he needed something more flexible."  
  
"That makes sense," Clarke nodded. "Anyway, getting back to the topic of the wingsuit, I just wondered if you'd considered… well, making any more?"  
  
"More?" Astrid looked at Clarke in surprise, before she looked back at Hiccup with an intrigued expression. "Actually… I mean, if you've worked out the kinks…"  
  
"You want one?" Hiccup looked at her with an eager grin.  
  
"Well, like you said, if we're ever separated from our dragons, it can't hurt to have the ability to glide for a _bit_ …" Astrid observed with a thoughtful smile.  
  
"Besides, what if we could just fly _with_ the dragons?" Clarke added. "I mean, being able to just kick off and fly on our own… I'm not saying that I don't like flying on Griffin's back, but can you honestly say that it _wouldn't_ be cool to be able to fly alongside Stormfly?"  
  
She'd jumped on the idea as something to stop the others asking questions she wasn't ready to answer yet, but the more she tried to sell it, the more she suddenly found herself eager for her own set of wings…


	17. The Tale of the Dragon Hunters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: For the HtTYD fans, I've just started assisting Sandy97 in translating her HtTYD/Frozen fic “ _[Crossed Souls](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13634253/1/Crossed-souls-English-version-of-Almas-Cruzadas)_ ” from Spanish into English, so I can recommend checking that out. It's a fascinating storyline that brings the two worlds together in a remarkable manner, as Drago Bludvist attacks Arendelle searching for the secret to the land's ancient magics, while the new alliance between Berk and Arendelle forces Hiccup and Elsa into a political marriage that leaves them to deal with growing feelings for each on top of Hiccup's enduring love for Astrid and Elsa developing her own complicated dynamic with the blonde Viking.

When Clarke woke up, even her amateur eye could tell that the sun was so high in the sky above the tower that it was at least close to noon, if not already in the afternoon. For a moment she panicked at the idea that she'd missed a meeting, but calmed herself down with the reminder that if past experience had taught her anything, it wasn't likely that the Riders would have left her alone if they legitimately wanted her for anything.

Besides, considering the reasons she'd been late, she had a feeling that Hiccup and Astrid would understand, considering that the three of them had become caught up in the talk about to put Hiccup's wingsuit idea into practice. She might not have been an engineering expert like Raven, but Clarke would like to meet the person who _didn't_ find it cool that they might be able to fly in any way. She'd drawn on every scrap of knowledge she'd gained from the times she'd helped her father do some work to offer Hiccup a few new ideas on how they might get working flight suits for all of the riders. Astrid had even managed to bring up the idea of using some shed scales from their dragons to make the accompanying wingsuits fireproof so that they could more easily fly with their dragons, and the three of them had kept talking until it was so late that nobody was sure what time it was…

Shaking her head as she looked around the Edge from her tower, Clarke's eyes widened when she realised that she saw no signs of activity in the base. She forced herself to calm down when she saw no sign of damage, doubting that anyone could have mounted an attack on the base and captured all six of the other Riders and their five dragons without causing any damage, and she was equally certain that Griffin would have reacted if anything like that had happened.

"Hey," she said, looking over at her dragon with a brief smile, Griffin raising his head to look at her with a dragon 'smile' on his face in return. "Is everything OK with you?"

Griffin rumbled in acknowledgement before he peered over the edge of the tower and then looked back at her.

"We go down?" Clarke asked, slinging her leg over Griffin's back to settle into position on her saddle as soon as he rumbled in acknowledgement. With a couple of beats of his wings, Griffin had taken her back down to ground level, leaving Clarke to get off and head for the main hall area of the Edge. It didn't take long for her to find a small note, held onto a table by a small rock, written in carefully-scrawled English.

_Gone on raid._

_Back soon._

_Riders_.

It wasn't a very detailed note, but keeping in mind that she didn't think these people wrote English on a regular basis, Clarke had to appreciate that they'd gone to the trouble of writing a note that she could understand in the first place. Besides, in a strange way, the fact that they'd just left her alone like this marked a step forward in Clarke's view; after leaving her mostly alone the previous day apart from long-range 'observation' by the twins, she and the Riders were now at a point where her new friends trusted her not to do anything to the Edge if she was left on her own.

She was willing to acknowledge that part of her was a little put out that she hadn't been invited along, but when she was still training with Griffin she was willing to trust that they just weren't sure if she was ready yet.

"So," she glanced over at Griffin with a smile, "now that we've got the place to ourselves, care for some practice?"

Griffin's roared response and lowered shoulders were all she needed to confirm that he agreed with her plan. Getting back onto her dragon's back, Clarke once again felt the rush of exhilaration as she and her dragon took to the air and flew off to take up a position above the forests. After a quick look around to confirm that there was no sign of any ships coming towards the island that she might need to worry about, Clarke leant forward and Griffin went into a dive in response, the dragon soon diving under the treetops. Clarke gave a brief tug on Griffin's head-spikes to level the dragon off as they began to weave through the trees, wings close to Griffin's side before another tug from Clarke sent him back up into the sky.

"Heat blast!" Clarke yelled, indicating a mountain range a short distance from their current position. Griffin opened his mouth and let out a loud roar that launched a blast of hot air at the mountainside, steam rising from the red-hot rock. Looking at the rock face, although she freely admitted that she wasn't sure about the science of hot air versus fire, Clarke was struck by the thought that Griffin's lack of fire was actually a good thing for her. She wouldn't go so far as to say that hot air _couldn't_ kill anyone, but people were less likely to die from it than they would if her dragon was launching fire at them.

It was a small detail, but after she'd spent so long causing more death even as she tried to save everyone, she appreciated anything that would help her _not_ kill people.

_Maybe… if I ever go back… Griffin can help me show them there's another way…_

Clarke shook that thought off as soon as it crossed her mind; she barely owed anything to the people who had basically forced her to commit mass murder because none of them were willing to face their own problems, but the Riders had accepted her as one of their own when all she had to do was be kind to her new friend.

Maybe she'd go back to at least see her mother and a few of her friends at some point, but as far as she was concerned, the Ark and the Grounders could manage by themselves for a while; she had found something better here and she was going to enjoy it.

Turning her attention back to the current agenda, Clarke and Griffin spent the next couple of hours flying around the island, alternating between testing Griffin's firepower, having 'races' against the clock (Clarke was grateful she'd managed to keep her father's watch working so far), or just leisurely flying over the island to take in the area. As she passed the newly-installed hatch, she briefly wondered about the runes and other boxes she'd found down there, but as nobody had expressed any particular interest in her new sword so far she didn't think it was worth asking them about it. Besides, she'd heard a story or two about a time when the twins had found some old rock that apparently declared that this island had been discovered by an ancestor of theirs before the rock was destroyed. The furniture and other items she'd found down there were probably just remains of whatever expedition that man had been part of, rather than anything she needed to worry about herself.

_God, for all I know, it could just be some clue one of the original park designers created as another 'clue' for one of those games they were meant to run here…_

Putting thoughts of the possible past aside, Clarke returned her attention to staying on Griffin's back as the dragon resumed his rapid pace through the air, weaving and ducking around the trees with the occasional blast of hot air when she indicated the time was right.

After a few practice blasts, Clarke began to get more invested in the training herself, encouraging Griffin to dive down towards the ground so that she could jump off and draw her sword in the same moment. She had a couple of close calls, nearly cutting her arm the first time and missing the sword on the second attempt, but by the third her timing was just right so that she could draw the sword and slash out at a nearby tree to leave a distinctive mark on its bark.

She did the same thing against a couple of other trees to ensure that the first one hadn't just been a fluke, before she decided that it was time to head back to the main outpost. Back on Griffin's back, they flew directly back to the stables, Griffin heading to the feeding trough to swallow down a few fish while Clarke picked up a few loose scales from the ground, stroking them softly between her fingers as she smiled thoughtfully. She obviously didn't have much experience with animals, and hadn't encountered many reptiles back on the mainland, but from descriptions on her books she couldn't imagine that any standard scaly animal would be this smooth to the touch, firm yet comfortable…

Taking a closer look in the stalls as Griffin casually strolled around the stable, it soon became clear that the dragons must shed at least a few scales each night just through their daily activities. Clarke briefly wondered if they ever shed their skins completely, but when she thought about it she was fairly sure that was just snakes; she vaguely recalled an old biology course about how lizards could just shed some scales at a time, and she doubted that Hamish Haddock would have managed to 'edit' that detail out of the dragons' primarily lizard biology.

Thoughts of the dragons' origins put aside in favour of the more immediate questions, Clarke started to gather the loose scales together into small piles in a corner of the stable. It was probably a minor effort that may not even be needed if Hiccup could find a better material, but Clarke had a feeling the potential fireproofing would outweigh the challenges of getting the material together in the first place, especially when it didn't hurt the dragons.

She didn't know how it happened, but she'd become genuinely impressed with Hiccup's skills during her time on the Edge. She still admired Raven's ability to adapt limited resources, but considering that Hiccup was basically starting from scratch as far as he was concerned, she doubted that even Raven could have pulled off some of his feats if she'd been in his position. Putting aside the idea of him basically rebuilding his own leg, she had to admire how he must have adapted all these saddles for each individual dragon, and that was before she considered what he had achieved in terms of inspiring his tribe to completely rethink their approach to dragons.

Lexa may have accomplished a lot in her time as the Commander when she was a few years older, but from what Clarke had seen Lexa would have probably had the advantage that people would have basically worshipped her once she was appointed to her role, but Hiccup had done so much when all he had going for him was his father's reputation, and that was before she took into account that he'd been a screw-up before he met Toothless…

Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard a distant roar from further out on the ocean. Turning in the direction of the roar, Clarke smiled in relief when she saw the other five dragons coming back towards her, although she was surprised to see as they drew closer that Ruffnut and Snotlout seemed to have swapped dragons for some reason, with Ruffnut and Hookfang looking surprisingly wet. Slipping the scales into her pocket, Clarke walked out to the front of the stables as the Riders came into land, a nonchalant smile on her face.

"Bit of an impulsive trip out this morning, wasn't it?" she grinned nonchalantly at her new friends.

"Yeah… sorry about that," Astrid said apologetically. "We just… got a message about a raid we had to deal with, and… look, you're doing well-"

"I get it," Clarke nodded in understanding. "It's not like it's been completely quiet since I got here, you've got a lot to deal with, you can't afford to drag along the rookie, and… well, I appreciate the trust."

"Trust?" Fishlegs asked in surprise.

"You left me alone here," Clarke indicated the outpost with a smile. "I mean, considering that I'm still new to all of you… well, I appreciate that you trusted me not to do anything."

"Hey, no problem!" Tuffnut grinned over at her as he leapt down from his head (Clarke _thought_ his head was Belch, but she was willing to admit she might be wrong). "You've been pulling your weight, you helped out the Night Swarm, you stopped me doing anything stupid after I got bit; put all that together, you've earned it."

"Well… I appreciate it," Clarke nodded, as Griffin walked up behind her and let out a friendly 'bark' at the other dragons. "I managed to use the time get in some training with Griffin; I'm not saying we're on the same level as any of you yet, but I think we're getting there."

"That… could be good," Hiccup said, exchanging a glance with Astrid before he glanced over at the other Riders; Tuffnut and Snotlout were talking enthusiastically about something off to the side, but Fishlegs and Ruffnut were looking at Clarke, Hiccup and Astrid in a thoughtful manner. "What do you think?"

"She didn't trash the place because we left her behind; she's no Loki devotee, but I can see why people would like her," Ruffnut shrugged.

"I… think we can trust her too," Fishlegs nodded, smiling tentatively at Clarke.

"She's got my vote."

"Well, that's four in favour; we… probably don't need their input right now." Hiccup looked over at where Snotlout and Tuffnut had started wrestling with each other for some reason before he looked back at Clarke. "We have a spy in the dragon hunters."

"Spy?" Clarke repeated in surprise. "You… OK, you mentioned dragon hunters, but there are enough of them that you need a _spy_?"

"Her name's Heather," Astrid explained. "We helped save her parents from an old enemy of Berk a few years ago, and last year we learned that she'd managed to train her own dragon, a Razorwhip called Windshear, and the two of them were working together to deal with a group of bandits back home. A few months later she made contact with the hunters and managed to convince them that she was willing to help them because… well, her brother's part of the group."

"Her brother?" Clarke repeated in surprise. "Uh… no offence, but if her brother's on their side, how can you be sure-?"

"She was raised in secret away from her brother for her own safety; they only even met last year, and he's deranged enough to care more about her being related to him than what she did before they knew that," Fishlegs explained with a brief eager smile that made Clarke think of Octavia, back in the first few days of innocence before the harsh realities of life on the ground sunk in. "She's been sending us a few tips about their planned raids for the last few months, but…"

"It's getting riskier," Astrid finished for the larger Viking.

"For… Heather, you mean?" Clarke asked, wanting to be sure she was keeping the cast list straight. "Not meaning to question your experience, but if she's infiltrating a group of known dragon hunters _with_ a dragon, isn't that automatically dangerous?"

"Thank you," Hiccup nodded at her before he looked back at Astrid. "After all, I wanted her out weeks ago and somebody talked me into-"

"I know I did," Astrid cut Hiccup off. "But things were different then."

"How?"

"The longer she stays there, the riskier it gets, and she's still no closer to finding this… Viggo character."

"Viggo?" Clarke asked.

"Viggo Grimborn, the leader of the Dragon Hunters," Hiccup explained. "We've run into his brother Ryker, and Heather's brother Dagur is pretty high up in the hierarchy as well, but we've only heard them mention Viggo without actually seeing him directly. If we can take Viggo down, the whole Dragon Hunter army will be without a leader and they'll collapse."

"It's that simple?" Clarke asked.

"Maybe not _that_ simple, but from what Heather's heard and passed on to us, most of the hunters are basically following plans laid out by Viggo when they go into action rather than doing anything purely on their own initiative," Astrid put in. "Add in that they're meant to send _every_ dragon they capture to Viggo, and everything we know seems to indicate that taking out Viggo would at least be a major blow to their operations."

"Not the type to have a successor in the wings, huh?"

"Not from what we've heard," Hiccup confirmed. "Heather's committed to maintaining her cover until she's got some clear evidence to lead us to Viggo, and she's got Windshear to get her to safety if she thought they were getting onto her."

"And she's not the type to pull out on her own?" Clarke asked.

"Bingo," Ruffnut nodded at Clarke, before Snotlout and Tuffnut raced past the others, Snotlout being pushed in a wheelbarrow that suddenly came to an abrupt stop, vaulting Tuffnut over the top to land in front of it with a loud whoop.

" _Best time ever_!" both teens said, before looking at each other in awe. " _Oh, my Thor. I cannot believe you just said that! Me neither_!"

" _Did we just think each other's thoughts_?" Snotlout asked.

" _Uh, I think we just did, 'cause that's what I just thought_ ," Tuffnut grinned back.

" _You know what that means_?" Snotlout replied, placing his hands on Tuff's shoulders as Clarke glanced over at the other Riders to see them watching their fellows in a tentative manner that Clarke could only compare to the awed terror of watching a car crash in some of the Ark's old films; evidently their words were just as crazy as it sounded from the tone.

" _I have… I have no idea_ ," Tuffnut's expression shifted from a smile to a confused stare.

" _We just became official best friends_."

" _What_?" Tuffnut looked at Snotlout with new intensity. " _I_ _have never had an official best friend! Always unofficial acquaintances_."

" _Well, you do now_ ," Snotlout grinned. " _Come on, bring it in, but this time, for the real thing_."

"Ah, ah!" Tuffnut said, as Snotlout wrapped his arms around Tuffnut in a thick hug. " _It's good, it's real, it's real enough_ -"

" _Will you two please take it somewhere else_?" Astrid glared over at them, shifting back to whatever Viking language these people had formed in her exasperation. " _I can't hear myself think_!"

Clarke just rolled her eyes as Tuffnut and Snotlout headed out of the stables before she looked over at Ruffnut.

"Just so you know, I sympathise with your brother being an idiot, but I hope you don't expect me to… stand in for him or anything like that," she observed.

"I'm up for hanging out, but no need for you to go that far," Ruffnut smiled in understanding. "Tuff's always had his idiot moments; he'll be over this one soon enough once Snot does something really bone-headed."

"In the meantime, we should work out what we're going to do about Heather," Astrid added. "I'm just… I _really_ don't think it's going to be safe for her to keep up this undercover role much longer…"

"She'll hold out," Fishlegs affirmed, with the same tentative hope in his voice that reminded Clarke of her own desperation to convince her people of something she wasn't entirely sure of herself.

_On the bright side, now that I know what they're dealing with, maybe I'll be able to help them come up with something…_

She may not have liked being the leader back home, but if she could just come up with a plan to help protect the dragons…


	18. The Secrets of the Riders

"So… this is what brought you out here?" Clarke studied the strange object thoughtfully, both impressed at the design and curious about how it could do what she had been told it was capable of.

"The Dragon Eye," Hiccup nodded at her, taking the elegantly-carved tube back from her, sitting in the main 'meeting area' with Fishlegs and Astrid as their dragons squatted around them. "We found that when dragonfire illuminates the lenses, it displays a range of information about certain types of dragon."

"And," Fishlegs added with a smile, "we've found that we can get new information if we mix different lens combinations with the light from different dragons."

"Impressive," Clarke said as she looked at the Eye with new appreciation. "Where did you get it?"

"Hiccup found it on a dragon hunter ship a while back, and we followed the first lens out here," Astrid explained. "We've found a few more lenses since we got here-"

"You did?" Clarke looked more eagerly at the other blonde. "Where was that?"

"Well, Gustav- he's kind of a junior rider who lives back on Berk- found a couple of lenses when he visited us a few months back, and Hiccup and I actually found a couple more while we were investigating Lycanwing Island," Fishlegs explained.

"…Is that what you were referring to when you said the lycanwing was just a myth to keep people away from something?" Clarke looked with new curiosity at the large Viking.

"You remember that?" Hiccup asked in surprise.

"I was curious what could be on that island that might be such a big deal that you still didn't want to tell me about."

"Uh… sorry we didn't-"

"I get it; you don't want to share all your secrets with the new girl too quickly," Clarke nodded at the one-legged young man with a reassuring smile, before she looked more thoughtfully at the lens. "So… could I borrow it?"

"Borrow?" the three other Riders said simultaneously as she looked uncertainly at her.

"Just for tonight," Clarke clarified as she indicated her tower. "If mixing lenses and dragon fires reveals different information, I'm just curious to see if anything happens when Griffin tries to light it up."

"He doesn't actually generate _fire_ -" Fishlegs began.

"But he _does_ generate heat in the back of his throat before he lets off a heat blast that might be some kind of illumination," Clarke interrupted, Griffin opening his mouth to demonstrate the aforementioned glow. "If it doesn't work out, we've lost nothing, but I'd be interested to see the result."

"You're sure?" Fishlegs looked curiously at her. "You did say you can't read our language, and these runes are… well, they're tricky…"

"Just give me a chance," Clarke smiled. "At the very least I can let you know if I found anything interesting; if nothing stands out, we've lost nothing."

"That… seems fair enough," Hiccup nodded, as he handed Clarke the Eye and the lenses. "Just be careful with them, OK?"

"No problem," Clarke smiled as she took the offered objects, already contemplating what she might learn from this new opportunity.

She appreciated that she still needed some time to really get to grips with the written version of their language (which she'd call 'Norse' just to keep it simple, even if she had her doubts about whether it was real Norse or just whatever the park would have made up for their games), but if there was anything on these lenses that she and Griffin could pick up…

* * *

Clarke had no idea how she had slept the previous night after spending so long studying the lenses. She'd noticed Hiccup and Astrid leaving later that afternoon, following a small figure that she had tentatively identified as some kind of tiny dragon, but she had decided to focus on her own self-assigned study of the Dragon Eye and hope that they would tell her if they needed her. The twins and Snotlout seemed to be having a semi-argument down in the Edge, but so long as they weren't going to do anything too stupid she felt comfortable leaving the others alone, particularly with Fishlegs to keep an eye on the rest.  
  
The Eye itself had proven to be a fascinating device. She was fairly sure that it had been designed as part of the Dragon Sanctuary's old games, but that didn't mean that the information it provided was any less interesting. She hadn't been able to clearly read any of the information it gave her, but by comparing each lens and combination of lenses to Hiccup and Fishlegs' existing notes, she'd soon confirmed that Griffin's flames did turn up a few new details on each lens that the other Riders hadn't found yet. She'd had to take care when copying out the additional runes, but it still felt good to find something new.  
  
 _Maybe not anything world-shattering, but good to know I've contributed something_ …  
  
The simple joy of discovery was something Clarke hadn't let herself appreciate since she first came to Earth and learned that she and the rest of the 100 weren't the only human life on the planet. Every day she spent on the Edge, it was as if the Riders had given her more opportunities to help when she hadn't even known she was looking for them. Where the rest of the Ark residents and the Grounders had basically forced her to lead them and then everyone started complaining when they didn't like what she did, the Riders continued to ask nothing more of her than that she care for Griffin and chipped in to help around the Edge.  
  
Snoutlout might have an inflated opinion of himself and the twins might be so eccentric Clarke privately wondered if she should work out some way to give them medication for some sort of mild psychiatric disorder, but they were basically good people who recognised their limits even if they wouldn't say it explicitly. Fishlegs just had some self-confidence issues despite his intelligence, and Hiccup and Astrid were practically made for each other in Clarke's view even if Astrid was having trouble admitting it, Hiccup's compassion and intelligence well-matched by Astrid's courage and combat prowess. Thinking back on what she'd learned about their experience as part of a team, the fact that Clarke had just been invited to join their morning briefing, she had to spend a few moments resisting the urge to come down with a broad smile on her face at this new sign that she had been accepted as part of the wider group.  
  
"So," she asked, as she sat down at the table to look around at the Riders, "what was with last night's trip?"  
  
"There was a trip last night?" Tuffnut looked at Clarke and Hiccup in surprise. "Why wasn't I informed?"  
  
"Because you were off doing whatever you were doing with your new best friend?" Ruffnut pointed out as she waved a disdainful hand at Snotlout.  
  
"Hey!" Snotlout yelled indignantly before he looked over at Clarke. "And how did you know about it when we-?"  
  
"I'm your lookout right now, remember?" Clarke countered (she couldn't quite get over how easy it was to fall into this simple camaraderie; she'd never have felt comfortable enough to just… _tease_ her old allies like this). "That doesn't just mean looking for things coming _to_ this outpost."  
  
"And on that topic," Hiccup said, in a cool voice of authority that prompted all six of the others to turn and look at him, "last night Astrid and I got a message from Heather; the hunters are after the Flightmare."  
  
"Flightmare?" Clarke repeated, even as the rest of the teens looked anxiously at each other. "I think my dad told me about those… remind me, what kind of dragon is that?"  
  
"A dragon that glows a brilliant blue at night and releases a mist that paralyses its victims," Astrid said, the blonde Viking's tone particularly cool. "One of them… let's just say it's one of those dragons we don't look into training."  
  
"There are dragons you can't train?"  
  
"More there are dragons that are too wild, too big, or just too dangerous to train," Hiccup clarified. "If we can leave them alone, they're not too bad, but… well, as an example, Toothless has a bad history with Whispering Deaths and they're basically immune to most attempts we might make to calm them down before training."  
  
"…I probably don't want to know what that's like in person," Clarke noted, mind flashing back to an image in her father's pamphlet of a dragon with a massive mouth full of teeth and a strangely spindly body.  
  
"Probably not," Hiccup nodded. "Anyway, the point is that, even if we can't train the Flightmare, we know that the hunters can't be allowed to capture it, so we're going to need to go after it…"  
  
"And we're bringing Clarke along?" Ruffnut grinned.  
  
"Not yet," Hiccup shook his head before looking back at Clarke. "It's not that I don't think you're capable, but… look, this could be our best chance to get the leaders of the hunters while he's off-guard-"  
  
"So you can't afford to be worrying about how the new girl will perform under pressure," Clarke finished for him, nodding in understanding. "Fair enough; I'll keep practising at this end while you're away."  
  
"Thanks," Hiccup nodded at her, before nodding at the Dragon Eye. "And you might want to keep that on you; I'd rather we didn't just… leave it lying around if we've got someone to keep an eye on it."  
  
Clarke nodded in understanding even as she fought the urge to give Hiccup a grateful hug; the thought these people trusted her with the safety of the most important thing they had just reinforced how she felt like she belonged here.


	19. Battle for the Flightmare

"Whoa!" Fishlegs said, studying the map Heather had provided as he and Meatlug flew alongside the other dragons. "Heather's tracking and mapping skills are quite extraordinary. Is there no end to that girl's talents?"

"Can we just talk about the elephant in the sky for one second?" Tuffnut put in.

"That… depends," Hiccup looked tentatively at the Zippleback. "What kind of elephant are you thinking of?"

"Why do we think Viggo wants the Flightmare so badly?"

"Maybe Viggo likes the way that algae stuff makes you glow when you rub it all over yourself," Ruffnut grinned.

"You know something?" Hiccup glanced over at the twins. "You may not actually be that far off. He's gotta be using its algae, or its paralyzing spray, for something…"

"We can ask him ourselves, if we're waiting for him when he gets there," Astrid said, prompting the group to put on an extra burst of speed towards their destination island. Touching down on a prominent-looking cliff, Hiccup walked up to the edge, Toothless on one side of him and Fishlegs on the other, and peered over the side.

"There!" he said in satisfaction; just as Heather's map had indicated, the Flightmare was almost directly below them, the glowing dragon drinking the glowing algae flowing through the stream. "Let's stay together. We need to make sure Viggo doesn't get anywhere near that dragon."

"How will we know when Viggo's here?" Fishlegs asked, before Toothless let out a harsh growl. Following his dragon's gaze, Hiccup soon saw the distant form of an approaching ship, and it didn't take his knowledge of Toothless to realise why the dragon was so upset by that.

"He already is," Hiccup observed, before turning to the twins and passing them a bag. "OK, Ruff, Tuff, make sure you get enough algae-"

"To lure the Flightmare away; we know," Ruffnut took the bag.

"God, this guy never stops," Tuffnut groaned. "'Lure the Flightmare away, don't eat the algae'…"

"Ridiculous," Ruffnut said. "I mean, why would we eat the algae?"

As the twins flew off, Hiccup thought he heard them musing on the possibilities of eating the algae, but he decided not to worry about that too much; the twins might be eccentric at best back on the Edge and Berk, but they'd never blatantly let him down while they were on missions.

* * *

When Clarke let out a yell of joy after Griffin's latest loop-the-loop, she couldn't stop herself laughing as she realised what she'd just done. She'd never been the type of person to just let herself go like this even before her father died, but even if she knew that the dragons were in trouble, it couldn't take away the thrill of this moment.  
  
"Why would anyone think that trapping your kind was a good thing?" she shook her head, reaching over to stroke an area behind Griffin's horns that she'd found he seemed to like.  
  
 _More to the point_ , Clarke silently wondered to herself, _how could a society like that develop out here_?  
  
She understood that Hiccup and the others used to be at war with the dragons before Hiccup trained Toothless, but there was still a bit of a gap between fighting dragons off in the name of self-defence and going out there to try and harness them like cattle or something like that…  
  
Looking out at the ocean beyond, her eyes widened apprehensively as she saw a large ship approaching the island. She couldn't see anyone on it at this distance, and she had a feeling that she was close enough to the Edge's mountains that she and Griffin would probably be hidden by the island's natural formations, but if that logo of a flaming red fist was what she thought it was, she and Griffin were in trouble…  
  
 _Or are we_?  
  
She had faith that none of the Riders she'd met would have betrayed her existence to the hunters, and she was also fairly sure none of them would have mentioned her to their current 'double agent', which would mean that there was literally no way Heather could have told the hunters about Clarke to try and 'prove herself' to them.  
  
"Come on," she said to Griffin, already lowering her voice as she kept her eye on the approaching ship. "Stick close to the trees, and stay quiet; let's see how this plays out…"

* * *

"Uh, Hiccup?" Astrid said, just as Hiccup was checking Toothless's armour. "You might wanna see this."  
  
"Hiccup, you might wanna see this, too!" Fishlegs called out. Glancing to either side of the originally-identified ship, Hiccup cursed under his breath as he saw four more ships approaching from the left and three from the right; things had just become _far_ more complicated…  
  
"Uh, I don't understand," Snotlout put in, speaking for them all for a change. "I thought Heather and Viggo were coming alone."  
  
"They were," Hiccup said. "Which probably means they're not coming at all. Everyone, look out!"  
  
As the Riders leapt onto their dragons, just in time to avoid the fireballs striking the ground where they had been standing, Hiccup desperately scanned the surrounding ships for anything that might give him an idea as to his next move. For a moment there was nothing but silent tension in the air as the dragons stared down at the ships, until arrows started flying through the air towards them. There was enough warning for Toothless, Stormfly, Meatlug and Hookfang to evade the initial attacks, but Hiccup wasn't comfortable relying on what bits of armour they'd managed to put together so far for protection, and they couldn't risk getting closer-  
  
His train of thought was interrupted when the twins suddenly flew past on Barf and Belch, Ruffnut screaming in terror, followed closely by the roaring Flightmare.  
  
"Not the way I would have done it, but that's one way to go," Hiccup mused, as the twins sent Barf and Belch weaving desperately around the sky trying to evade the pursuing Flightmare, rocks and arrows still bombarding them from the ships. As the hunter fleet drew closer to the island, Hiccup and Astrid took Toothless and Stormfly in for a quick assault run, launching a few fire blasts at the attacking ships, but Hiccup knew they were too outnumbered to force anyone into a retreat like this. Looking around the ships as he pulled back up towards the other Riders, he could just see a figure fighting her way past a group of hunters, but he couldn't afford to worry about Heather right now; either she could handle herself and would join them later or she couldn't.  
  
"Hiccup!" Astrid called over at him as they returned to their friends. "There's too many of them!"  
  
"And the Flightmare really isn't helping," Fishlegs added, indicating the circle of mist above them as the Flightmare continued to pursue the twins.  
  
"We'll be fine as long as we stay away from its mist," Hiccup said, wishing he had a better response.  
  
"Hiccup," Tuffnut protested, as Barf and Belch settled into position flying alongside Toothless, "can't you just let it know we're the good guys?"  
  
"Yeah," Ruffnut added, looking anxiously over at the glowing blue dragon flying alongside them. "Tell it to come in for the big win."  
  
The moment he heard that, Hiccup was amazed he hadn't thought of this approach sooner.  
  
"You guys are brilliant!" he grinned.  
  
"I don't know about brilliant, but we do have a certain glow about us," Tuffnut chuckled. "Get it? 'Cause of our faces."  
  
"And the brilliance is short-lived," Hiccup shook his head and turned back to the plan at hand. "Follow me!"  
  
As the ships continued to fire at them, Hiccup indicated to the other Riders to stay further up while he dived in for an attack, nipping close to Barf and Belch to grab a few satchels of algae from the twins before he pulled away and downwards. With a bit of careful timing, Hiccup evaded the next few arrows as he aimed for one of the more heavily-armoured ships in the fleet and launched his first bags of algae, smiling in satisfaction as they hit the deck.  
  
"Oh no!" Hiccup heard Ryker's voice yell mockingly up at him before he and Toothless had passed out of range. After flying past the other ships to drop a few more satchels of algae, Hiccup looped Toothless back around and smiled in relief to see the Flightmare was already attacking the first algae-covered ship, just as he'd hoped.  
  
"Ryker, Dagur," Hiccup addressed his two long-time foes. "I'd like you to meet my friend, the Flightmare."  
  
With that introduction made he flew back up to join the others, looking back in satisfaction to watch the Flightmare move from ship to ship, paralysing all the hunters who came at it before flying on to its next target.  
  
"I'm so sorry, Hiccup," Heather said, flying up to the group on Windshear; whether she'd escaped on her own or used his distraction, Hiccup wasn't sure and didn't care so long as she was safe. "Viggo; he made me-"  
  
"I know, it's OK; he tricked us all," Hiccup reassured her. "Where is he now?"  
  
"Still on his ship, I think," Heather said, turning her gaze back towards the fleet. All eyes immediately fell on the distinctive form of the glowing Flightmare, but any hope it brought them to see the hunters take such a beating from their intended prey was quashed when the Flightmare was trapped by a large net, following by a pair of hunters placing a muzzle on its mouth before it could hit them.  
  
"Just wait-" Hiccup began, mind already racing to think of the best way to get that dragon to safety.  
  
"Sorry," Heather looked over at Hiccup. "Not gonna happen."  
  
"Heather, no!" Hiccup yelled, before the dark-haired girl dived down towards the ship. He was briefly proud that he didn't need to warn any of the other Riders to hang back, but that didn't change the frustration he felt when a launched net trapped Windshear before she and Heather could reach the ship, sending them both crashing to the deck. He made an initial test-dive after her, but quickly pulled up at the spree of arrows sent flying towards them; if he couldn't get past that on Toothless, none of the other Riders were going to pull it off.  
  
"Astrid, keep trying for Heather," he called over to her. "It's time Viggo and I were properly introduced."  
  
Any other dragon would never have been able to pull this off, but Toothless had basically made a living being hard to see in the dark long before he and Hiccup became friends. As Astrid led the other Riders in an attempted attack, Hiccup looped around to head for the first ship he'd originally seen in this fleet, only peripherally registering how the others were turning around to leave. A part of his mind was impressed at the rate of speed those things could demonstrate, but right now he had to focus on the chance in front of him.  
  
Unfortunately, as soon as Toothless landed on the main deck of the ship, it was clear to Hiccup that this had been a waste of time. The ship was not only quiet, but it was completely empty, with no obvious sign that anyone had been on it in the first place. Hiccup could only guess that Viggo and whoever else had been on this ship (assuming there had been anyone here in the first place) had managed to get off and transfer to another ship at some point during the fight; on a dark night when their opponents were all high above, it wouldn't have been that hard to change ships while he and the Riders were distracted.  
  
"Where is he?" Hiccup muttered, taking in the empty vessel.  
  
"We couldn't get Heather," Astrid said, as Stormfly landed on the deck alongside Toothless. "There were too many of them."  
  
"What about the Flightmare?"  
  
"Gone," Astrid said bitterly.  
  
"Viggo too," Hiccup observed, indicating the deserted ship. "Astrid, this guy isn't messing around."  
  
"No kidding."  
  
"Our dragons may not be enough," Hiccup said, unable to hide his apprehension at his own words. "We're gonna have to out-think this guy, outsmart him somehow, or Heather and Windshear have no chance of-"  
  
"Don't say it," Astrid cut him off. "Please, just don't say it."  
  
Hiccup appreciated how Astrid felt about the situation, but he couldn't ignore the facts; Viggo had clearly known about Heather's double-agent status for some time, which meant that he likely knew everything about them that Heather had shared with the hunters to maintain her cover.  
  
He knew that she hadn't shared anything _that_ dangerous with their enemies, but that still meant that they were going to have to come up with a strategy that Viggo couldn't predict based on what he'd known about them before now…


	20. Cleaning Up the Edge

Clarke had experienced some rough nights since she landed on Earth, ranging from just the challenge of sleeping in the dropship with all the other delinquents until they could build something else to the few nights she'd spent on her own after leaving Camp Jaha until she found Griffin, but none of them could match the night she'd spent hiding around the Edge trying to avoid what could only be the dragon hunters. She didn't know what they were looking for, but as she waited just close enough to see that the hunters went into each hut and came out empty-handed, she was privately relieved that she could reach down and feel the weight of the Dragon Eye in her jacket pocket; she'd just brought it along so that she could look at it when she got tired of her earlier training, but if it wasn't the very thing these hunters were after, she'd be very surprised.

As it was, she had to spend a good couple of hours making sure Griffin didn't do anything too impulsive while she tried to keep an eye on the hunters' ship. As much as she wouldn't trade the bond she had formed with Griffin for anything, his hot air attacks weren't going to be much use against a whole ship full of armed and experienced dragon hunters when she had nothing more going for her than her own dragon and some very fragmentary lessons in self-defence. She winced as she saw the hunters throw various things out of the huts, ranging from some of Astrid's weapons to fragments of cloth and metal that she guessed were some of those other wingsuits she'd suggested that Hiccup could work on, but had held the dragon back unless they showed signs of doing serious damage. The dome in particular lost a few bits of cloth, and some of the storehouses would need to be rebuilt, but the hunters didn't seem interested in actually taking any of the stores, so Clarke was willing to let those slide…

Finally, after what felt like hours of silent watching, the hunters returned to their ship and departed, a definite edge to their manner that Clarke could only interpret as frustration. Griffin looked at her in a curious manner as the ship pulled away, but Clarke urged him to stay put, keeping a careful eye on the ship until it had gone past the horizon. Once the ship had vanished from view, she urged Griffin onwards and she and the dragon entered the Edge, and Clarke immediately hopped off Griffin's back and began to pick up the discarded items outside each hut.

"I may not know where anything goes, but I can at least make sure it's all in _some_ kind of order before they get back, right?" Clarke glanced at her dragon as she gathered up Hiccup's wingsuits and carried them back into the hut. "See if you can… get everything piled up a bit?"

She wasn't sure if she should feel stupid for giving that kind of order to her dragon, but as she watched, Griffin seemed to nod and took a quick 'hop' over to Fishlegs' hut, where he began to gather some of the rotund Viking's books and scrolls into a sort of pile in front of the hut with his wings. He glanced over at Clarke as though seeking approval, and Clarke nodded and smiled back at him as she picked up some of Hiccup's own papers where they had been left on the ground. Glancing over a few of them, she was surprised to see that the papers contained notes about the Dragon Eye, but guessed that the hunters who'd been sent here either didn't read or had been so interested in the Eye itself that they hadn't paid attention to anything that wasn't what they were looking for.

Putting the rest of the papers back in the hut, Clarke was surprised to see a few large tail-fins on the back walls that had been left untouched, along with a small desk that seemed to be Hiccup's primary workspace. It was easy enough to work out that the fins were alternative fins for Toothless, but she couldn't work out what was different about them beyond the colour, and this wasn't the time to examine the fins in more depth.

Turning her attention back to the other gathered items, Clarke smiled at the opportunity to take a more direct look at each of her new friends' huts. Astrid had a more armoured hut with a design on the front that strongly resembled Stormfly, while the interior was practically swarming with fallen weapons and shields; what had been tossed outside just seemed to be some of the larger specimens. For a moment, Clarke regretted that she couldn't do a better job, but decided to just be content with getting everything out of the open air and hoping Astrid wouldn't mind having to re-organise them when she got back.

When she reached Fishlegs' hut, Clarke sighed in frustration when she saw a few broken shelves on the walls around her; it looked like the hunters had been in a particularly foul mood when they got to this area. Fortunately Griffin had done most of the work getting Fishlegs' things together before she got here, even if her dragon partner had done some damage to the rock garden positioned alongside the hut when he walked through it.

"We'll just tell him the hunters did that, shall we?" Clarke smiled over at her dragon before she moved on to the twins' hut. The double entrance seemed a bit pointless, but considering the mismatched design of the exterior, she supposed that the important thing was that it all fit together and wouldn't fall apart. She still didn't get the point of the pit at the bottom of the hut, but for the moment she would just appreciate that there wasn't that much to worry about putting back; unlike the others, the twins seemed content with a more minimalist style rather than collecting weapons or papers.

With the rest of the huts cleaned up, Clarke sent Griffin to do what he could to clean up the rest of the camp while she moved to look over Snotlout's hut, but soon realised that the contents of this would be harder to just replace. She had no idea why he had so many jars and pots, but most of them had been broken while the hunters were searching, although it looked like the shields on the walls had been left relatively alone. She had just finished helping Griffin gather up the last of the broken jars before she heard the familiar roars of the other dragons, looking up to see the five familiar forms flying towards the outpost. Her relief faltered when she noted that there were only the five familiar sets of wings when they had made it clear they were expecting to take at least one prisoner and retrieve Heather at last, but put her questions aside until they had all landed on the wooden platforms.

"Hi-" she began.

"What were you doing in my hut?" Snotlout looked pointedly at her.

"Putting things back after the hunters threw them out." Clarke looked coolly back at Snotlout; if she could deal with Bellamy at his most arrogant, Snotlout was hardly a challenge even if he was annoyed.

"There were hunters _here_?" Hiccup looked urgently at her.

"Well, they didn't exactly identify themselves, but they were definitely here looking for something, and I feel safe assuming they weren't your friends," Clarke explained, as she indicated where Griffin was 'sweeping' some of the debris from the damaged storehouses with his tail. "Luckily, Griffin and I were training in another part of the island when they arrived, so we saw them coming in time to just hide out and keep an eye on things-"

"You hid?" Astrid looked at Clarke in a cool manner.

"Well, what else was I going to do?" Clarke shrugged. "I was one person who's been with her dragon for a few weeks against trained hunters; I like Griffin, but I wouldn't like to bet on our chances in that scenario."

"Fair point," Fishlegs observed, and Clarke noted Astrid give her a slight nod of approval.

"What did they even want here?" Ruffnut looked around at the open hut doors and gathered piles Clarke still hadn't managed to put away. "I mean, aside from mixing up our stuff?"

"Well, I appreciate that I'm the new girl here, but I think they were looking for _this_ ," Clarke answered, taking the Eye out of her jacket pocket.

"You had that?" the twins and Snotlout looked at her in surprise.

"She's been studying the lenses with Griffin to see if he turns up anything new," Fishlegs explained before looking at Clarke with new curiosity. "Did you-?"

"Their ship arrived while I was still practicing staying on this guy while he's in the air, so it wasn't exactly a good time to try something that would involve _light_ ," Clarke observed as she patted Griffin on the wing. "Anyway, we kept an eye on the Edge from the woods so that we could step in if anyone looked like they were going to actually try and damage the outpost, but once they left, we decided that it would be easier to just try and get everything back inside now so you could sort it all out yourselves."

"Did you _have_ to-?" Tuffnut began.

"We appreciate the help," Astrid interrupted him with a grateful smile, even as she glanced into her hut and winced. " _This_ is going to take a while… once we've dealt with Viggo."

"Ah," Clarke said, looking around and confirming for the first time that there were no unfamiliar faces in the group. "I take it that the sting operation didn't go well?"

"Sting operation?" Fishlegs asked.

"A term my people use," Clarke explained. "You set up a scenario where you lure in a criminal or some kind of target by making them think they're going to make a big score of some sort, and they end up being captured when they basically walk into your trap."

"Huh," Hiccup said. "'Sting operation'… I like that."

"Anyway," Astrid cut in with a cool stare, "we got to the Flightmare's island, but Viggo must have been expecting us; he brought more ships than we were expecting, and Heather and the Flightmare ended up getting captured while we were trying to fight them off."

"Ah," Clarke said, lost for a better response to learning just how badly things had become. "That sucks."

"Tell me about it," Snotlout shook his head. "We ended up getting lost in the fog trying to find them afterwards…"

"Well, at least that explains why he let Heather's infiltration last this long," Astrid observed as she indicated the Edge. "He must have assumed we'd go after him at full strength once we got the chance and didn't expect that we'd leave someone behind."

"Or that the Dragon Eye would be somewhere other than your huts," Clarke put in.

"Yeah…" Hiccup nodded, looking at Clarke with a thoughtful smile before he turned to look at the rest of the group. "OK, we did what Viggo was expecting, and now we've got to get Heather, Windshear and the Flightmare to safety or this is just going to get worse."

"But that's what we do," Astrid said (Clarke tried not to over-analyse the way Astrid said 'we'; she was pretty sure she was only being included in that statement because she was standing here). "We clean up the mess. All of us."

"We can get the A-Team from Berk, load up whatever weapons we can and go in, dragons blazing!" Fishlegs speculated enthusiastically.

"A-Team?" Clarke asked curiously.

"A reserve team of dragon riders Astrid trained up to defend Berk while we're away a couple of months back," Hiccup clarified.

"Check," Clarke nodded in understanding, while privately wondering if the name purely a coincidence or if this was another sign of something from the pre-apocalypse culture.

"Yeah!" Snotlout yelled in glee. "We hit 'em with everything we've got and _really_ show 'em what we're made of!"

"Can I bring Macey?" Tuffnut asked (Clarke really had to wonder what this man's obsession was with that particular mace). "She's been begging to come along on a mission."

"No!" Hiccup said firmly. "No, we're not going anywhere. Nobody is going anywhere. Not yet anyway. Think about it. We do what we do really well. We're a pretty smart group. We're fast, we're fearless and we ride dragons. But this guy, Viggo, he manipulated us like we were a bunch of inexperienced little kids. If we have any chance against him, we can't go in dragons blazing like we usually do. No, that could get Heather and Windshear killed. That could get one of us killed."

"Well, I, for one, am definitely against getting us killed," Tuffnut put in. "Or at least my getting killed."

"Yep, I have to agree," Ruffnut said. "And not just because we're twins and we always think the same way."

"So you just want to leave Viggo to hunting and hurting dragons at will?" Astrid looked at Hiccup in surprise. "You want to do nothing?

"I want to do the right thing," Hiccup corrected. "And that is going to take some thinking."

As Hiccup's expression became grimmer, one thought came to Clarke; after what Viggo and his hunters had done to her new friends' allies, she had a definite sense that her time just staying on the Edge was coming to an end…


	21. Maces & Talons

Clarke appreciated that she was basically an amateur at this kind of thing, even before she took dragons into account, but even she knew that she was in the middle of a difficult situation at best. Hiccup and Astrid had gone off to take another look at the ship this 'Viggo' guy had left behind in case they'd missed something, leaving the rest of the Riders to work on putting the outpost back together after the raid.

"How long did it take to build this?" she looked curiously at Fishlegs as they moved a few barrels back into the storehouses.

"Build the Edge?" Fishlegs asked.

"I mean, Hiccup told me you came to this island over a year ago, but how long did it take you to _build_ this place?"

"Uh… a couple of weeks, I think."

" _Weeks_?" Clarke looked at the rotund Viking in surprise as she indicated the buildings around her. "You did all this in _weeks_?"

"…Yeah?" Fishlegs looked at her uncertainly. "Is… that a problem?"

"It's just…" Clarke waved her hands at the outpost; even with dragons to make up for the lack of advanced equipment, it was still amazing to think about how quickly they had put this together. "I mean, my people took ages to set up a basic camp when we were in the same place for weeks, and we were in a thick forest with a stable ground; you had to create all of this…"

"Well, Berk got used to rebuilding after we spent the last few generations fighting dragons," Fishlegs shrugged. "When you're constantly under attack from fire-breathing dragons and we're living in wooden huts, we have a lot of experience in rebuilding homes as fast as possible."

"Yeah, but that's working from a pre-existing structure; you seriously put this place together from scratch in a couple of _weeks_?"

"…How long did it take your people?" Fishlegs looked at her. "To set up their camps, I mean?"

"That's… that's a very involved question," Clarke answered, as Meatlug and Griffin settled into position around their riders as though they were listening to the story herself. "I mean, when I initially reached the mainland, we just adapted our ship to serve as our main house and set up a few food preparation stations and defences around it, and when our main craft arrived, they did the same thing, but at the time we were basically preparing for a war so we didn't have time to really learn how to put actual _work_ into it…"

"You were at war?"

"It just… happened," Clarke said tentatively. "My initial expedition accidentally landed in territory occupied by a native tribe, and we ended up provoking a fight before we realised that there was anything else in the area."

"Oh," Fishlegs said, looking awkwardly at her. "Uh… how did you do that?"

"We were setting off flares to try and alert our people that we were safe and we ended up… well, we set off a few fires before we realised that there was anyone there to get freaked out by what we were doing."

"Ah," Fishlegs nodded in understanding. "You ended up angering the locals?"

"We only realised there was anyone else there to worry about after we provoked some of them by entering their territory and had to kill some of them in self-defence, and after that it wasn't easy to convince them that we weren't just trying to eliminate the competition before the rest of us came down," Clarke explained. "We managed to make a kind of peace with them when we found there was a bigger threat to deal with in the area, but after that fight was over… well, I decided to get out and leave them to sort it all out; it just seemed… better that way."

Fishlegs just nodded in understanding, which Clarke appreciated; she had already surprised herself with how much she'd shared, but the large young man had a gentleness in his manner that made him surprisingly easy to talk to. He was strong enough that he could easily overpower her, but remembering all the times she'd seen him playing around with Meatlug and eagerly making notes of whatever she found in her own studies with the Dragon Eye, it was hard for Clarke to see Fishlegs as anything more than an understanding friend rather than a physical threat.

"I… I'm sorry."

"For what?" Clarke looked at him in surprise.

"That we couldn't… I mean, if you left your people because it wasn't easy-"

"I left because I… I had to get away from everything that had gone wrong," Clarke explained with a reassuring smile, as she placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. "I agree that it's not exactly been easy here either, but you've all been… you _accept_ each other even if you don't always agree, I've never been made to feel like anyone will get kicked out if they don't constantly meet your standards…"

"I thought you said-?"

"I _did_ choose to leave, but that was after some of my friends just kept on criticising me for not managing to find another way to deal with… certain situations," Clarke shrugged awkwardly, not wanting to dwell on those times Octavia, Jasper or Raven had blamed her for deaths she'd honestly done everything she could to avoid. "I never _wanted_ to let people die, but I just always seemed to get stuck in a situation where it was let some die now or risk everyone dying later…"

"That… uh, that sucks," Fishlegs said, looking at her with a sympathetic expression that suddenly made Clarke feel somewhat reassured. From everything she'd heard about the Riders' efforts since coming to the Edge, they'd generally tried to avoid causing too much damage even to their enemies, but here was Fishlegs, listening to her all but explicitly admit that people had died because of her and still not judging her…

"Hey guys!" Tuffnut suddenly ran up to Clarke and Fishlegs. "Hiccup and Astrid are back; they want us all in the main hut!"

Clarke and Fishlegs briefly looked at each other and nodded in understanding before they followed Tuffnut to the Edge's meeting hall, where the other four were already waiting.

"OK," Hiccup nodded at the last three arrivals before he continued, "when Astrid and I got to Viggo's ship from last night, the only thing he'd left there was this."

Hiccup laid a thick-sided wooden box on the table, which contained what looked to Clarke like a basic few islands arranged around what she assumed was water. There were three figures in the box that reminded her vaguely of chess pieces, except that they looked more like stereotypical Vikings, including horned helmets, beards, and axes. Two of the figures were standing up, but the third figure was lying on an island in the middle of the board, apparently broken in half.

"Maces and Talons!" Fishlegs yelled enthusiastically. "Does this mean-?"

"No, Fishlegs," Hiccup cut him off.

"But Maces and Talons was designed to test the abilities and decision making expertise of future chiefs in the heat of battle."

"I'm not taking over as Chief of Berk," Hiccup said firmly. "Viggo left this for me; he wants me to play Maces & Talons with him."

"Viggo's here?" Tuffnut said.

" _No_ ," Clarke looked at the male twin in exasperation. "Stop being so _literal_ , Tuffnut; the board is a metaphor for the… _game_ Viggo wants to play with Hiccup!"

"What big picture?" Ruffnut asked, looking up as though it might be above them.

"Viggo's forcing my hand," Hiccup clarified, even as he shot a grateful glance at Clarke for her attempt to explain things. "He's making me play him for Heather's life."

"And what happens if you don't play?" Fishlegs asked.

"I think we can safely assume that Viggo's going to do something with his hostage?" Clarke asked.

In response, Hiccup held up the broken piece from the middle of the board.

"Uh… sorry, I don't know this game; should that mean something to me?" Clarke asked awkwardly.

"It's the Traitor," Astrid explained solemnly.

"And the Traitor always dies at the end of the game…" Fishlegs said, his vow low and his tone anxious as he looked at Hiccup. "You-you have to play, Hiccup; you just have to!"

"And we need a strategy," Snotlout said.

"We do, Snotlout," Hiccup affirmed. "And that strategy has to be different than any he's ever seen or tried, or Heather won't stand a chance."

"Well," Clarke looked over at Hiccup with a tentative smile, "consider me your secret ace in the hole."

"What?" the others looked at her.

"It's a reference to a game my people played with cards," Clarke explained. "Long story short, the Ace in most games is a pretty high card that could basically help win the game if you play it right, and 'in the hole' means that nobody else knows you even have it until you're ready to play it. Obviously this isn't the same kind of game, and I'm not saying I'm your 'ace' in the sense that I'm _brilliant_ , but I think that Griffin and I should be enough of a surprise to throw Viggo off if we're careful."

"My thoughts exactly," Hiccup nodded at Clarke. "If you're sure?"

"Oh, trust me; I'm _really_ looking forward to kicking this guy's ass," Clarke nodded, punching her left palm with her right hand. "Just point us in the right direction and we're _there_."

"Glad to have you on the team," Hiccup smiled, before his expression became serious. "OK, so far Viggo's priority has been fighting smart and avoiding putting himself in danger, acting as the Marauder equivalent in this game because he can basically be sneaky where he thinks we just stick to the rules."

"So we need to break the rules?" Tuffnut grinned. "I can work with that."

"I was more thinking that we need to work out a way to _bend_ the rules and throw in a few new twists," Hiccup explained.

"Such as that armour you've been putting together with the material from Arrow Station, maybe?"

"It's not ready yet-" Fishlegs began.

"But it doesn't _need_ to be," Hiccup cut the larger Viking off with a growing smile. "If we can use it right, even a bit of extra protection might be enough…"

He glanced over at Clarke as another thought came to him. "Think you can talk Griffin into letting himself get blackened up for a bit?"

"To help him hide when we attack at night?" Clarke grinned. "A bit of soot and armour should help us cover all the angles…"

"Uh… isn't that a bit redundant when we've got Toothless to mount a sneak attack?" Fishlegs asked.

"Not when Viggo's going to expect Toothless," Hiccup explained. "They'll be looking for me and him, but if we can stop anyone seeing Griffin until we're _ready_ for him to be seen, Clarke might just be our… ace in the hole?"

"You have my interest," Clarke grinned. "What do you want me to do?"


	22. Saving the Eye

Flying behind the Riders was the first time that Clarke had truly missed modern technology since she'd met Griffin. She was still impressed to see the effort Hiccup had put into creating even the dragons' current limited armour from the metal they had acquired from the remains of Arrow Station, and even the quick 'paintjob' they'd done on Griffin should hopefully be enough for the current plan, covering him with ash and a few bits of paint in the most exposed areas, but it was frustratingly hard to hear Hiccup calling out his orders from the front of the group without a radio or anything like that.

Still, her position bringing up the rear at least offered the advantage that she'd been able to stop Snotlout ordering Hookfang to light himself up before he could give away their position. She'd even been able to help him keep warm by having Griffin 'shoot' the occasional burst of heated air at the shorter Viking when he began to complain, which seemed to be enough to keep Snotlout focused as they approached the island.

"You're sure about this?" Clarke called out to the other Riders as she glanced apprehensively at the thick clouds below them. "I mean, you said you haven't been here before-"

"Heather gave us a few maps to the Hunters' base; we just didn't have any reason to try and do something like this before," Astrid called back as an explanation.

"And you can find your way in this?"

"We just follow the stars," Fishlegs explained as he indicated the sky above them. "It took a while to work out how to navigate when we're not sailing, particularly when we sometimes don't even know the seas below us _exactly_ , but we worked it out-"

"We're here!" Hiccup called back, the group of dragons coming to a mid-air halt as he looked back at the others. "OK, once we get below the clouds we have no way of knowing what they're going to hit us with, but we need to be prepared to defend ourselves. Clarke, like we discussed, you and Griffin break off to the side and let us draw whatever they're going to use against us; you need to stay undercover until we're sure-"

" _She_ gets to be safe off to the side?" Snotlout protested.

"Because she's the only one they won't be looking for right now," Astrid pointed out to the other Viking with a frustrated sigh. "Have you ever paid _attention_ to Hiccup's briefings?"

"Let's just get on with this," Hiccup held up his hand before Snotlout could say anything more. "Clarke… good luck."

"See you later," Clarke nodded, pulling off to the side as the other dragons dived down through the clouds. Following her new friends down at a more removed angle, Clarke forced herself to watch as the other Riders were suddenly forced to evade powerful blasts of flame from the land below. She could just about see four large dragons on the ground with pale heads and thin necks attached to thick bodies, launching powerful flames at the Riders, but it was too far away to see why those dragons weren't flying away or how they were being made to attack the other Riders. For the moment, as much as Clarke wanted to help her new friends, she had to focus on her own task and have faith that Hiccup and the others could overcome that particular challenge on their own.

"C'mon, Griffin," she said, leaning over to whisper to her dragon. "Stay close to the water and head around the island, but _be quiet_."

Griffin let out a low rumble in response and followed her commands, flying down so low that he was basically just above the surface of the sea. So long as a sudden storm didn't start in the next few minutes, this distance should be enough to avoid attracting too much attention, particularly when Griffin's brighter skin was covered by paint and ash. She kept a careful eye on the island coast, grateful that the moon and the nearby flames were bright enough to illuminate the most significant parts of the island without making her own presence too obvious. After going past the area where the hunters had apparently moored their ships, Clarke turned Griffin inwards and moved carefully towards the coast again; she couldn't go too low in case the water splashed off Griffin's paint-job and made him visible to the casual observer, but she equally couldn't get too high in case she drew attention…

Once they had reached the island, Griffin landed on the ground and began to pace cautiously up the coast, crouching close to the ground. Looking cautiously around, Clarke saw a few hunters standing further down the island, weapons raised and a couple of dragons nearby that Clarke was fairly sure were Nadders, but she decided not to worry about that at the moment; if those hunters were waiting here, they weren't going to be worrying about anything further inland.

"Just keep quiet, Griff," she said, cautiously stroking her dragon between the spines on his neck. "We can't help the others if we're caught; stay low and head inland."

Griffin let out a low rumble of confirmation and kept moving, wings folded close to his sides as he almost weaved his way through the trees. Even with Clarke's weight on his neck, Griffin maintained a brisk pace through the woods, weaving around a few trees and rocky patches. She didn't entirely like taking this much time while her friends were in trouble, but she had to have faith that Hiccup and the others could handle themselves until she was in a position to help.

 _Damnit, I left so that I wouldn't_ have _to be in charge of anyone, and now I'm complaining when I'm_ not _the one taking the risks and giving orders?_

Clarke wasn't sure what it said about her that she had come this far to avoid being responsible for anything and still felt like she _should_ be in charge of something. She had no intention of trying to take over from Hiccup, and genuinely agreed that his current plan was the best plan they had to deal with whatever Viggo might have to throw at them, but going from leader to unofficial medic/healer was such a drastic shift…

The faint sound of someone talking up ahead prompted Clarke to place her hand at the point where Griffin's neck joined his skull, exerting a light pressure to 'encourage' him to press even closer to the ground. Still not daring to get off his back, Clarke shimmied up her dragon's neck as carefully as those small spikes on his back would allow to listen closely to whatever was being said.

"…joining us tonight," an unfamiliar voice was saying. "But on the positive side, you've far exceeded my expectations; good on you."

Clarke heard the sound of men moving into position, but as far as she could tell none of them were anywhere near her. From the way Hiccup had described English as 'traders' tongue', she guessed that the other man was using it now because he wanted to be sure all of his men could understand him, which likely meant that he was waiting for some kind of cue. If she was careful, she might still have a shot at getting out of this and putting Hiccup's plan into action…

"So many guards, so little time," the first voice said. "But please, I am enjoying this. I'll give you a head start."

"Why would you do that?" Hiccup's voice replied suspiciously.

"Because I'm nothing if not a good sport," the new voice said, with a smirk in his tone that reminded Clarke of Bellamy in the early days when he thought he was in control of everything and she was just an idealistic kid. "And if I didn't, the game would end here. And what fun would that be?"

As silence temporarily settled over the area, Clarke carefully prompted Griffin forward, and found herself looking into a small, rocky valley, filled with various cages, each just large enough to hold a dragon of a similar size to the ones she'd seen so far. Hiccup was running through the small valley, only to be surrounded by a few other hunters armed with crossbows, the Flightmare being held down in front of him, a pair of large men on either side of it and a thick muzzle over its mouth. Toothless was perched on top of a cage just behind Hiccup, but it was clear that too many men were gathered around for Hiccup to just mount his dragon and fly away.

"There you are, Hiccup," that new voice said, allowing Clarke to trace the speaker to a young man, probably a few years older than Hiccup, standing on top of another cage. The man was wearing a black tunic with spike guards on his shoulders, and the light from the Flightmare helped Clarke see that he had large brown eyes and brown hair that was surprisingly neatly cut considering how thick most peoples' hair was out in these island. "Didn't get as far as I imagined."

"Game's over, Viggo," Hiccup retorted, confirming Clarke's theory about the other man's identity.

"I'm so sorry you feel that way," the now-confirmed Viggo retorted as he jumped down from the top of the cage, Toothless doing the same to stand beside Hiccup. "Was I not a worthy adversary? Don't answer that. Your surrender speaks volumes."

"No one is surrendering," Hiccup responded.

"All right, then here's what I propose," Viggo countered. "Turn over what you stole from me- what has belonged to my tribe for centuries- and I will give serious thought to letting you and your friends go free."

"You're talking about the Dragon Eye?" Hiccup asked.

"'Dragon Eye'…" Viggo said thoughtfully. "A fitting name. If you don't mind, I'll use that."

"Well, have it your way, Viggo," Hiccup said, placing his hands on either side of Toothless's saddle. "But don't say I didn't warn you."

As Viggo nodded at the men holding the Flightmare, Clarke knew it was her moment to act. With a speed that surprised herself as much as anyone else, Clarke only had to squeeze Griffin's neck with her heels and the Windstriker had leapt forward, firing a blast of hot air that intercepted the Flightmare's mist as it left the muzzle but before it could touch Hiccup or Toothless. Clarke was slightly surprised to see that the glowing blue cloud was actually blown back towards the two dragon hunters standing on either side of the Flightmare, leaving them frozen in place as Hiccup and Toothless leapt up to the top of a small cliff near their old position. Before the frozen hunters could start moving again, Clarke directed Griffin to fly over them, Griffin knocking one man down with his claws while Clarke leant over from her position on Griffin's back to punch the other in the face.

"What the-?" Viggo said, as Clarke and Griffin spun around to take up position beside the now-freed Flightmare, Griffin placing a warning paw on the back of one of the fallen hunters.

"Hi," the blonde said as she sat astride the Windstriker dragon, glaring at the head Hunter. "I'm Clarke, and this is Griffin; we understand you're hunting dragons for profit?"

"Who-?" was the only thing that the lead hunter could say as he stared at Clarke in shock.

"This is not a commentary on our trust in Heather, but we hadn't actually been keeping her up-to-date on events back at our camp," Hiccup observed with a teasing grin from his position on the upper cliff.

"Meaning?" Viggo asked, trying to smile mockingly at them even as he couldn't hide his shocked gaze at Clarke.

"Meaning that we haven't been deploying our full resources on our raids against you so far," Hiccup grinned, indicating the blonde girl with a smile. "Clarke's our new healer, but she has some interesting tactical experience as well."

"And this seemed like a good opportunity for me to step in," Clarke affirmed, as she took hold of the chains keeping the Flightmare trapped. "So, Mr Grimborn, are you going to let us go, or does this have to get tricky?"

"…Well played, Hiccup Haddock," Viggo nodded at the young man on the Night Fury. "Just when I thought you played right into my hands, you introduce a new player… I truly hope we are able to compete again."

"This isn't a game, you prick; this is about you treating the most incredible creatures on the planet like they're just here for your own damn _profit_ -!" Clarke began.

"Let's just… get out of this and worry about that particular issue later," Hiccup cut her off, shooting a warning look at Clarke before he turned back to look at Viggo. "Where's Heather?"

"Oh, she's in the caves around here," the hunter waved a dismissive hand at the larger rock formations further inland. "I left her in the hands of her brother; he _is_ the one she most betrayed, after all…"

A brief exchange of glances with Hiccup was enough for Clarke to confirm their next move; she'd have to abandon their enemy in favour of rescuing their ally. She and Griffin moved away from the Flightmare so that Toothless could deliver a precision plasma blast to the large 'muzzle' that kept the other dragon's mouth shut, and then the three dragons leapt into the air and flew off towards the cavern. Clarke glanced back in case any of the hunters tried anything, but was disturbed to see Viggo holding up a hand in a halting gesture at his men as he watched them leave.

It could just be an extension of how this man seemed to see Hiccup in particular as a kind of worthy adversary, as though Viggo was letting him have this particular victory rather than try and continue a plan that he should now realise wouldn't work, but Clarke wondered if it was just a more drawn-out, sadistic version of her own final words to Finn, letting him have that brief moment before he died…

As Toothless and Griffin flew up to join the other dragon riders back at the main island cove, Clarke was relieved to see that not only were her new friends still apparently holding their own against the hunters' arrows, but the dragons they'd been using earlier had apparently vanished. Shifting their focus to the ground, Clarke and Hiccup dive-bombed the remaining hunters and had their dragons launch a couple of quick plasma and heat-blasts at the hunters from behind, forcing the hunters to run off while Hiccup and Clarke flew up to join their friends.

"How did it go?" Astrid asked as the riders came back together.

"Just like Clarke planned," Hiccup grinned. "Viggo had me cornered, and then Clarke and Griffin came diving in and took him by surprise; he didn't exactly have much choice but to back off while she helped me free the Flightmare."

"Also, it turns out that Griffin can actually force the Flightmare's mist back with his own breath," Clarke grinned, reaching over to pat her dragon on the neck. "Unexpected bonus, but I'm not complaining."

" _Nice_ ," Ruffnut nodded at the other blonde.

"Too bad that'll only work once," Snotlout shook his head bitterly. "You sure that was a good call?"

" _What was a good call_?" another voice asked in that new language Clarke was still trying to learn. Looking around, Clarke was surprised to see another young woman flying up to join them, with thick dark hair and wearing a brown leather top over a metallic-looking skirt and armbands. The girl was riding a slender dragon that put Clarke in mind of Griffin apart from its seemingly metallic skin and lack of spines along its back, the dragon looking up at the other riders with a slightly hostile expression that left Clarke feeling on-edge, as though it hadn't decided if it was going to attack them or not. " _And who's the new girl_?"

"Clarke," Clarke replied with a smile. "I take it you're Heather?"

"Yeah… and you are?" the girl looked at her uncertainly, even if she was now talking English. "I mean, I haven't met you before-"

"Clarke's new," Astrid explained with a grin of her own. "She's only been with us for a few weeks, and we were giving her time to decide if she wanted to stick around or just get some help training Griffin, but when we told her about the hunters in full, she decided to join us on this particular mission. The rest of us kept Viggo's forces busy out at the front of the island, while Clarke followed Hiccup and Toothless to help them take Viggo by surprise and get the Flightmare away from him."

"And she even suggested a good way to keep the Eye safe," Hiccup added as he looked over at Astrid. "It's OK?"

"Right here," Astrid patted the pouch on her side.

"You've got it?" Heather looked at her in surprise.

"Clarke pointed out that Viggo would expect Hiccup to keep it on him all the time, so the better move would be to just keep switching around which of us had it when we have to leave the Edge unmanned," Astrid explained.

"It just struck me as the best way to put him off-guard," Clarke explained. "In my experience, people like Viggo are just convinced of the idea that they're the smartest people in the area and everyone else is an idiot, so he'd probably assume that Hiccup would keep everything important on him rather than trust it to other people."

"That's… actually pretty good," Heather nodded thoughtfully at Clarke. "You've met a few people like that?"

"One or two," Clarke nodded, recalling the Wallaces' elitist attitude and even Jaha's own, more downplayed confidence in himself, to say nothing of Kane's initial attitude before he learned that Earth was habitable. "So what now?"

"Now we take that Flightmare back to its island," Hiccup said, indicating the glowing dragon behind them. "We screwed up Viggo's plans for this guy, rescued Heather, and showed him he still doesn't know everything about us; I'd call that a good night's work, right?"

* * *

"Well," Ryker looked in exasperation at his brother as the Grimborns stood in their tent a few hours later, " _that_ was a productive night, wasn't it?"  
  
"You consider the night a failure simply because we didn't achieve our primary goal?"  
  
"You're seriously telling me you're _not_ angry?" Ryker looked incredulously at Viggo. "We had Haddock in our hands, and not only did he get away with the relic, but now there's at least _another_ rider out there we know nothing about? And on top of that, we've lost our… was she a double agent when she didn't know we were using her?"  
  
"A question for another time, I feel," Viggo mused as he studied some papers on his desk. "When you think about it, you have to commend Hiccup Haddock; he recognised the limits of our knowledge of his own operations and hit us with at least one wild card to throw us off."  
  
"At least one?"  
  
"I have to assume that the mysterious 'Clarke' and her apparent tactical expertise are not the only new card he added to his hand," Viggo clarified. "If we are going to deal with Hiccup Haddock and reclaim our lost relic, it may be time for me to send a certain message."  
  
"A message?" Ryker looked at him curiously. "To who?"  
  
"Who else?" Viggo returned his brother's stare with a cool glare of his own. "I clearly underestimated Hiccup Haddock and his Night Fury, which means that, as much as I hate to concede it, the time has come to call in specialist assistance rather than keep doing things my way."  
  
"Him?" Ryker's curiosity shifted to surprise as he realised who his brother was talking about. "I thought he preferred to kill his prey; isn't that a bit counter-productive given our own plans for the Fury?"  
  
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Viggo affirmed. "All we need from him is to capture the Night Fury; once the dragon is in our power, I'm sure that we can come to some form of compromise that will see us in possession of all of the riders' dragons and Hiccup himself thoroughly demoralised."  
  
"And how long will that take?"  
  
"Hopefully not too long, if we send a message immediately and he hasn't moved too far from his last known location," Viggo explained. "In the meantime, pull back most of our existing resources; it can't hurt to let Hiccup and his riders think that we've been more shaken by his little scheme than we were, and it will just make it all the more shocking for him when we act again."


	23. Gronckle Invasion

It had almost been a week since their confrontation with the Hunters, and Clarke still couldn't entirely believe how well that particular confrontation had gone. She wasn't going to kid herself into believing that rescuing the Flightmare and stopping Viggo getting the Eye had completely driven the Hunters away for good, but so far the Riders hadn't been able to find any further sign of new Hunter operations since the clash on the island. The twins and Snotlout were constantly on at Hiccup to get back out there and find their enemies, but while Hiccup recognised that the Hunters were still a threat, he was personally content to focus on preparing their current defences and resources rather than actively searching for a fight.

Clarke wasn't entirely sure if that was the best approach, but Astrid had assured Clarke that she could keep an eye out for hunter-related matters while Hiccup focused on his own projects. Having handed 'custody' of the Eye over to Fishlegs for the moment so that the large Viking could continue his research, Hiccup was working on creating more of the wingsuits. He'd taken up Astrid's suggestion of using shed scales from the 'stable' area to make the suits more durable, and had even managed to convince the other Riders to let him take a few measurements to confirm the size he'd need for their own suits.

Frankly, that was the part that really amazed Clarke about Hiccup; the way he was able to work out so many subtle technical details that should have been beyond his cultural upbringing. Taming a dragon to fly for him didn't automatically mean he could understand the mechanics of flight; Clarke might have lived on a space station for most of her life, but even if she'd never really thought about how spacecraft could stay in the air, she appreciated how difficult it was to get the wing dynamics right for any means of artificial flight. From what Astrid had told her, Hiccup had already had a couple of successful test-flights with his previous suit, and that had apparently just been his second attempt to design something like that after a couple of months; the idea that he'd made that much progress so quickly…

Raven might still be the best mechanic Clarke knew, but there was a difference between asking Raven to recreate known technological feats with available resources versus Hiccup being able to put together things like that basically from scratch. If she ever had the chance to introduce them both, once Hiccup had been given a chance to learn some of Raven's tricks…

As much as she wanted to show loyalty to her old friend, Clarke had a feeling that Hiccup would be just that bit sharper than Raven if it came down to him trying to 'out-invent' her once they both had equal access to the same resources and knowledge. Raven was smart, but if Hiccup could master aerodynamics when he was basically starting from scratch while Raven had access to everything the Ark had to teach her, Clarke would be _very_ interested to see what he could do if someone gave him the chance to play with gunpowder and electronics…

"You OK?"

"Just thinking about… stuff," Clarke shrugged as she looked back at Astrid; there was no sense talking about her old friends to her new ones when they all had more immediate potential problems right now. "Any sign of something we should be worried about?"

"Not of Heather, not of the hunters, not of Dagur, not even any new dragons so far," Astrid shook her head. "Fishlegs has become caught up in translating a particular lens combination at the moment, so we haven't found anything new from the Eye, and I don't even know when Heather broke away from the rest of us…"

"Hey, that's not your fault; how were you to know she'd run off like that?" Clarke smiled reassuringly at her new friend. "At least we've still got the Eye, right?"

"Yeah, but after Heather spent all that time undercover for us… I'd just like to know that she's _safe_ now, you know?"

"All we can do is trust that our friends know what they're doing," Clarke said, forcing herself not to think about the former Ark residents; without an immediate war to worry about, she had to believe that her mother and her friends could manage to keep the peace.

"Which doesn't mean we can let our guard down here," Astrid mused, turning her attention back to Clarke's lookout tower. "You know, we've appreciated you spending time in that tower, but… do you want your own hut?"

"My own hut?" Clarke looked at her in surprise that swiftly shifted to a broad grin. "You're serious?"

"Why not?"

"I just… you know I've never done anything like that, right?"

"…What are we talking about here, just to be sure?"

"Built my own hut."

"Right, no lifetime of dragon attacks to give you the experience…" Astrid nodded in brief understanding before she smiled reassuringly at Clarke. "No worries; we can help you put all that together."

"You'd do that?" Clarke grinned gratefully at Astrid.

"Hey, you're one of the team now, which means you deserve your own space," Astrid nodded at Clarke. "I'm just sorry it took this long to confirm that-"

"I'm the new girl in an established group; I would have been surprised if you _did_ accept me that easily," Clarke gave Astrid a reassuring thumbs-up before a sudden burst of activity drew her attention. She glanced over at the source of the motion, but decided not to worry about it when she saw the twins dragging Hiccup somewhere; judging by Hiccup's own dismissive expression, it was probably just the twins being overly dramatic about something rather than a truly urgent matter. "So where should I start?"

"Just work out what kind of hut you'd like and we can probably put something together in a week or so," Astrid assured her as she indicated a couple of the closer outcroppings. "I get that it's still a bit isolated, but if you were up on the cliff it's just…"

"Yeah, it's not really practical for me to have to come down from a mountain like that whenever I need to join you all," Clarke nodded. "I mean, OK, I could use Griffin to get down, but it's not like we want to rely on the dragons for everything, right?"

"Quite," Astrid replied with an approving smile before she turned back to the nearby outcroppings. "We could set up a bridge to go with it… do you have any ideas for your hut?"

"Possibly…" Clarke nodded, already considering the possibilities as she looked at the other huts on the Edge. Her interest in art had always been more about sketching than design, but with the other huts to give her a few examples of what would work, she had a feeling that she could work something out given a bit of time to study the other huts and figure out what would work.

* * *

The next morning found Clarke still refining her initial sketches for her new hut; she was willing to accept some input from the others in case she'd made any mistakes in her design, but she thought she had a good idea so far. She had quickly decided that she wanted to set up a secondary room in her planned hut that could be used as a sort of infirmary, given her current status as the Edge's unofficial healer. Beyond that, she had given herself a bed and a small cupboard-feature she could use to hold her things, and dedicated a wall or two that she could use for some of her artwork when she had the time to decorate. She was toying with the thought of asking Astrid or someone else for a few weapons, but she wasn't sure if that would be overdoing it or not, particularly when she still hadn't found her 'niche' weapon.  
  
She had noticed Hiccup and Fishlegs leave on Toothless and Meatlug earlier that morning, an eagerness about Fishlegs' own manner that she hadn't seen from the large Viking before, but it apparently wasn't anything big. Astrid had explained that the other two was just following up a lead they'd found in the Dragon Eye to what was apparently the 'ancestral island home' of the Gronckles and the Boulder class of dragons. It was apparently a fair distance from the Edge, but it was still close enough that they could get there with a few hours' flight, so Hiccup had concluded that just he and Fishlegs would be enough for the trip.  
  
Considering what Clarke really knew about the dragons' origins, she speculated that the island was actually more where the Boulder-class dragons had been raised rather than any kind of ancestral home, but she'd be willing to concede that the island was probably important to those dragons. If Fishlegs wanted to check the island out, she wasn't going to stop him because she had some doubts about the scale of the discovery he'd made. The Eye might have been a prize in a game that gave false historical information about the dragons, but if her new friends hadn't found a reason to disbelieve the biological details they'd learned from the Eye so far she wasn't going to kill the mood by telling them what she knew.  
  
"Hey, Clarkie," a voice suddenly cut into her reflective thoughts. "How's things?"  
  
"Fine," Clarke replied as she looked coolly up at her least liked resident of the island. "How are things, Snotlout?"  
  
"Oh, you know how it is; Astrid's busy supervising the twins as they rebuild that lookout tower, which leaves the two of us free as a Terror-"  
  
"It leaves _you_ free as a Terror; _I_ am designing my hut," Clarke cut him off.  
  
"Your hut?" Snotlout's expression shifted from flirtatious to surprised. "You're settling in?"  
  
"Is there a reason I shouldn't?" Clarke looked back at him as she put down her writing implement, suddenly wondering if she'd missed something important.  
  
"Nope!" Snotlout grinned, dispelling her initial apprehension. "Just surprised Hiccup was ready to relax enough to let another skilled warrior in; he always seemed to think we had a pretty well-oiled machine here-"  
  
"When he's the one who invited me to this island in the first place?"  
  
"Just shows he knows a good thing when he sees it," Snotlout said, his grin becoming a bit more uncomfortable as he looked Clarke over. "And I have to agree with-"  
  
"Take this any further and I will take my boot and deliver it at full force to a certain area between your legs," Clarke replied in a cool tone even as she turned her focus back to sketching out her hut.  
  
She appreciated that Snotlout had shown some of his better qualities during that incident with the female Monstrous Nightmare a few weeks back, but it wasn't enough for her to find him seriously attractive, and after the way things had turned out with Finn it was best to nip even the possibility of something similar in the bud as soon as possible. That said, she was satisfied when Snotlout winced and turned around to walk away, leaving her to continue refining her own plans.  
  
 _Assuming that the other huts are any example of what Hiccup and the others are capable of, I just need something a bit bigger than two of my original cell… I don't want a full traditional house, just somewhere I can be alone…_  
  
The sound of a grumble drew Clarke out of her thoughts.  
  
"Hey, Fishlegs," she said as she looked up. "Wasn't expecting you…"  
  
She trailed off as she found herself looking at an unfamiliar orange Gronckle, with a grin on its face that Clarke wanted to recognise as 'cautious' even with the obvious challenges in trying to translate the expression of an unknown dragon.  
  
"Huh," she said, lost for a better response as the Gronckle seemed to grin back at her. "You're… new, aren't you?"  
  
The Gronckle just rumbled at her in response before Clarke heard a more familiar growl over her shoulder.  
  
"Griffin," she looked back at her dragon with a teasing smile, "there's no need to be jealous; you're still… my…"  
  
She trailed off as she saw another pair of Gronckles squatting behind the Windstriker, while the twins were coming into land on Barf and Belch with an exasperated expression on their faces.  
  
"Uh… is this something you just didn't tell me about?" she looked cautiously at the twins.  
  
"Definitely not," Tuffnut nodded.  
  
"Oh yeah," Ruffnut agreed. "Turns out these guys have been the reason we've been having trouble setting up our new observation tower on the other side of the Edge; we're just trying to round them up and work out our next move."  
  
"Ah," Clarke nodded in understanding as she looked at the gathered dragons. "This… is going to be tricky, right?"  
  
"Until we know what these dragons are doing here, we basically have to make them our top priority," Astrid confirmed as she and Stormfly flew down to join them, looking apologetically at the other blonde. "Sorry to do this to you, Clarke, but making your own hut is on hold until we can sort out where these Gronckles came from."  
  
"You were making your own hut?" Tuffnut looked at Clarke in surprise.  
  
"I was drawing up plans," Clarke clarified, even as she folded up her drawing and tucked it into her pocket. "But don't worry, Astrid; I get that we have bigger problems to deal with right now."  
  
She'd just have to keep the plans safe for when this apparent Gronckle migration was finished…


	24. Natural Law

With Astrid and Snotlout trying to round up the new arrivals, the twins had been put to work trying to create a pit or something that they could use to keep the Gronckles relatively contained until they could work out a better solution. Clarke had been left to basically supervise the twins; given Astrid and Snotlout's superior knowledge of the Edge, it made more sense for her to make sure the twins didn't get distracted, and Griffin was useful to help keep the gathered Gronckles contained.

Hearing a few of their calls to the dragons had given Clarke more material to work with in her growing effort to learn their 'native' language, but she still made a note that she'd need to see about asking someone for actual lessons at some point. She'd lucked out so far that Viggo apparently preferred to communicate in 'traders' tongue' rather than whatever else they used to talk to each other, but she didn't want to rely on that now that she was forming a more permanent attachment to this place. The other riders were generous enough to stick to traders' tongue when they were addressing her directly, but Clarke had a feeling that she'd have more trouble if she had to spend more time on their home island…

 _I'm seriously thinking about that_?

The thought surprised herself, but as she stepped off Griffin to take a quick look at the latest retrieved Gronckle, Clarke had to admit that she wouldn't mind seeing where her new friends came from. The villages she'd seen back on the mainland had been nice enough, but she had to admit that there was something intriguing about the thought of seeing a society that had been defined by dragon attacks and a Viking heritage…

"Bizarre how this all happens, isn't it?" she said, looking thoughtfully at the distinctive purple Gronckle. "We all just came here trying to get away from something- because I don't believe you just flew here on a whim- and now here we all are, settling into a new and fascinating life for ourselves… all that hope and promise…"

She gave a more focused look at the Gronckle for a moment before she smiled at her latest thought. "You're a girl, right?" When the Gronckle growled at her in a manner that she chose to interpret as confirmation, Clarke reached out to give her a tentative scratch behind the 'ear'. "Then… can I call you Charlotte?"

When the Gronckle wagged its 'tail' at her, Clarke rubbed its nose in thanks. It was a small way to acknowledge the second major loss she and the rest of the Hundred had suffered when they arrived on Earth- those kids who had died in the crash and their losses to the toxic smoke had been relatively unavoidable, but Wells and Charlotte had died because of clear mistakes made by other people- but it made Clarke feel better…

When she looked back at the horizon and saw a new group of dragons flying towards the island, the only reason she knew Hiccup and Fishlegs were part of that particular group was that Toothless was clearly part of this wave of incoming dragons, the slender long-winged Night Fury a sharp contrast to the rest of the Gronckles. She didn't even need to call out to the other Riders to tell them about the sight; the twins had flown over her even as she was turning around to look for them, and she soon glimpsed Stormfly and Hookfang flying across the forest to join them. Quickly getting onto Griffin's back, Clarke prompted her dragon up into the air and followed them to the dragon's pens, landing on the ground just as Toothless, Meatlug and the other Gronckles joined the other four riders.

"What happened?" Astrid looked anxiously at the two returnees. "Is everything all right?"

"Aside from our run-in with a Catastrophic Quaken on Dark Deep, yeah, we're good," Fishlegs said with an anxious tone to his voice.

"Catastrophic what?" Tuffnut asked.

"Think a Gronckle basically the size of the Screaming Death with a large amount of spikes all over it and a double-jawed mouth," Hiccup clarified.

" _That_ doesn't sound good," Astrid observed grimly.

"Uh… Screaming Death?" Clarke raised a curious hand. "I don't think I read about that one."

"You know what the Whispering Death is, right?" Astrid glanced at her.

"Yeah."

"The Screaming Death is basically an offshoot of the Whispering Death, but so big that it could eat a standard Whispering Death in one bite, completely white in colour, and with red eyes."

"…Yeah, _that_ sounds terrifying," Clarke nodded in understanding, before she looked back at Hiccup and Fishlegs. "And something like that was on Dark Deep?"

"The Gronckle equivalent, but the size matches up."

"Which is why you brought _more_ Gronckles here?" Snotlout said, looking at the new arrivals in exasperation.

"It's just a few extra Gronckles; we can handle that."

"Just a few extra?" Tuffnut repeated.

"…Did we miss something?" Hiccup looked curiously at Clarke and Astrid.

"You should probably take a look back at the main camp," Clarke indicated behind her.

"There are _more_ Gronckles?" Fishlegs grinned as he saw the group of dragons around the camp below them, an orange-and-pink one looking particularly annoyed as it stared at another of its kind.

"You think these are other refugees from Dark Deep?" Hiccup asked.

"Well, it makes sense; there's not much else between here and there," Fishlegs observed, his grin putting Clarke in mind of Raven when she was getting particularly enthusiastic about her latest project. "Can you believe they flew all this way? Gronckles may be slow, but they are tenacious."

"Hey, don't put that rock in your mouth!" Tuffnut suddenly yelled at another orange Gronckle that had moved up to a position beside the riders. "You don't know where it's been!"

"Hiccup, these guys are out of control," Astrid looked urgently at him. "We have to get them back to their island."

"Which would involve dealing with the problem of the Quaken," Fishlegs said grimly.

"Quaken Shmaken," Snotlout said dismissively as he moved up to stand between Hiccup and Fishlegs. "You let one lousy dragon take over Meatlug's entire island?"

"It's not that simple, Snotlout-" Fishlegs protested.

"Oh, sure it is," Snotlout cut him off. "Quaken one, Mealug, _BUZZ!_ "

Clarke had no idea how a group of people who believed they were living in a Viking culture could have retaining their knowledge of the idea that a buzzer indicated that someone had lost something, but that noise Snotlout had just made was rather distinctive.

"OK, let's just drop that to focus on the bigger problem here," Hiccup put in, stopping Clarke from analysing that question any further. "We need to wrangle all these wild Gronckles, and for the moment, I'll put the twins in charge of that."

"Awesome," Tuffnut grinned. "It'll be nice to get to know these guys a little bit better; we got off to a little bit of a _rocky_ start on our relationship."

When the male twin laughed, Clarke was glad to see that she wasn't the only one of the other riders who didn't find that particular 'joke' funny.

"You see what I did there?" Tuffnut said as the others began to walk off. "I'll explain it later; my humour can be quite complex."

"Just be careful of Charlotte, please?" Clarke put in.

"Charlotte?" the twins asked.

"The purple female Gronckle back there," Clarke indicated the Gronckle pit with a smile. "I named her after… someone I failed to save."

"Who was she?" Ruffnut asked, the female twin looking surprisingly tentative as she asked the question.

"…She was a traumatised girl who was persuaded that the best way to deal with her fear was to kill my best friend after his father ordered the death of her parents."

"You've had a _very_ rough life," Snotlout looked back at her with what Clarke chose to interpret as his version of sympathy.

"I survived," Clarke said with a dismissive shrug, before she looked back at the twins. "Just… I'm calling the purple one Charlotte, so please don't forget that."

"Check," Tuffnut nodded at her with a smile. "Nice name, actually; any other suggestions?"

"Nobody who really… stands out," Clarke said at last. Some of the other early victims of the Hundred's time on Earth hadn't really emotionally engaged with her to the extent that she'd want to name a dragon after them, and if she ever chose to name a dragon after Wells, Finn or Anya, she'd want to be sure she had made the right choice; Gronckles just made her consider Charlotte's untapped potential as one of the youngest of their group. "Let's just focus on keeping these guys under control and work out our next move from there."

* * *

By the end of the day, Clarke wasn't sure if they'd set their sights too high or if they just didn't have the means to properly 'control' this many dragons at once. The Gronckles themselves were friendly enough, but when dealing with dragons with a seemingly insatiable appetite for rocks of all kinds and no way to keep them safely contained on this island, it was clear that she'd underestimated just how important a one-to-one human/dragon relationship actually was. The twins seemed to be only capable of doing a limited form of damage control rather than stopping the dragons from running riot in the first place, and while Fishlegs could offer some advice from his experience with Meatlug, there were still too many dragons for the riders to keep track of on their own.  
  
Eventually, once it seemed as though the immediate 'risk' of Gronckle-related damage had died down, Clarke left Griffin to grab some fish in the stables while she took another wander through the outpost. She was glad to see that the others' huts were relatively undamaged despite the chaos of the new arrivals, but noticed an open cupboard at the back of the stables with a few small vases of some sort in it. Her curiosity aroused, Clarke picked up one of the vases and opened it, but could only detect a strange smell that put her in mind of…  
  
"Hookfang?" she said to herself, as she re-corked the vase and looked at it in surprise. "What is this stuff?"  
  
After confirming that Griffin was enjoying a good meal of fish for the moment, she decided to take the vase and ask someone about it. After a brief walk, she found Hiccup and Toothless working at one of the outer edges of the outpost, but by the time she reached them, Fishlegs had joined them, an anxious expression on the large Viking's face as he spoke with the Edge leader.  
  
"…plan was?" Fishlegs asked Hiccup as Clarke drew close enough to hear  
  
"The plan?" Hiccup repeated in confusion.  
  
"For Dark Deep?" Fishlegs said urgently. "The Quaken?How are we gonna get rid of it?"  
  
"Oh, yeah," Hiccup said, turning back to the rocky outcropping nearby. "I've been thinking about that, Fishlegs, and… I'm not so sure we should. Get rid of it, that is."  
  
"What?" Fishlegs looked at him with what Clarke knew was surprise even without being able to see her new friend's face.  
  
"Well… I'm not sure that we have the right to interfere," Hiccup explained, putting down whatever he had in his hands as he turned back to face Fishlegs. "I mean, that's what happens in nature, all the Quaken has taken over the island for one day, maybe a bigger dragon will come along and the Quaken will be chased off. You know, who's to say?I'm sorry, Fishlegs."  
  
Fishlegs looked at Hiccup in silence for a moment before he walked off down another path, leaving Clarke free to walk up to Hiccup herself.  
  
"That… seemed a bit blunt, wasn't it?"  
  
"Blunt?" Hiccup looked at her curiously. "Assuming you're talking about what I just said to Fishlegs, in what way?"  
  
"I mean, just… _telling_ him he couldn't do anything about the situation on Dark Deep?" Clarke explained, grateful that Hiccup wasn't just accusing her of eavesdropping. "From what I've heard, you've gotten involved in helping wild dragons out before; what makes this different?"  
  
"Well… yeah, but in the past the dragons have needed our help because of us rather than them being dangerous in themselves," Hiccup explained. "I'm willing to argue that the Red Death was just too dangerous to be allowed to keep going, but the Screaming Death only attacked us because it was released on Berk by the Outcasts, and we had a few dragons attacking us because… certain people made mistakes…"  
  
"Should I assume Snotlout was responsible for at least one of those?"  
  
"He did try and sell Changewing eggs as stones of good fortune once…" Hiccup shrugged, before he continued. "Anyway, the point is that we dealt with those dragons to fix the mistakes other people had made in dealing with them, but right now… well, I haven't seen anything to suggest that the Quaken isn't just doing what nature intended for it."  
  
"So… no way of knowing if we'd be doing the right thing to force it off the island or make things even more complicated?"  
  
"Pretty much," Hiccup nodded, as Toothless moved in beside him in an apparent show of support. "We've had a few close calls where we landed on an island inhabited by dangerous dragons without knowing what was there, and then we just focused on getting off and leaving it in peace. With Dark Deep, I just feel that… do we have the right to force the Quaken to move on just because we already like the Gronckles?"  
  
"…Fair point," Clarke nodded tentatively. "I mean, most of my peoples' problems could have been sorted out a lot sooner if we'd just accepted that we didn't have the right to take over the land we'd arrived on when there were people already there."  
  
"Huh," Hiccup said, looking uncertainly at her for a moment before he noticed the vase in her hand. "Where did you get that?"  
  
"I saw it in a cupboard in the stables; I wasn't sure what was in it, and… well, I wanted to ask," Clarke explained as she held out the vase to Hiccup. "I thought it smelled like Hookfang-"  
  
"And you were right," Hiccup nodded at her as he took the vase from her. "It's Monstrous Nightmare gel."  
  
"It's what?"  
  
"Nightmares like Hookfang secret it to set themselves on fire, and we've used it to create… well, we use it to blow things up."  
  
"Really?" Clarke looked at the jar with new apprehension and respect. "You've created explosives?"  
  
"…Yeah?" Hiccup said, looking back at her with an expression that put Clarke in mind of the way some Grounders had looked when she or her friends had used a term that they weren't familiar with. Hiccup might understand the concept, but Clarke guessed that he hadn't defined it in that manner yet.  
  
"And this gel can make things burn…" Clarke looked thoughtfully at the vase before she turned back to Hiccup. "Have you thought about applying this to weapons?"  
  
"Weapons?"  
  
"I mean, if Hookfang and other dragons can use this to set themselves on fire, maybe we could use it to create… burning weapons or something like that?" Clarke shrugged. "OK, so when I say 'we' I appreciate that I mean 'you', and you'd probably need a strong metal to make sure it doesn't melt from the heat, but if you could make it work…"  
  
She trailed off, her mind briefly lost in the possibilities before she shook her head. "Actually, maybe it would just _look_ cool without really adding anything to it-"  
  
"No, that's… that could be something to think about," Hiccup nodded, a contemplative expression on his face as he studied the vase. "We've already managed to recreate Gronckle Iron since we got here, and it takes a _lot_ to damage that after it's been forged into anything; if I could create a hollowed hilt for the weapon to store some gel, and add something that would create a spark when I wanted the sword to light up…"  
  
As Hiccup picked up the hammer and iron bar he'd been working on earlier and began to walk back to his hut, muttering to himself as he looked at the vase in his other hand, Clarke was surprised when Toothless looked at her with an expression that the former Ark resident could only think of as resigned exasperation.  
  
"Hey, I just thought the flaming weapon idea might be cool; how was I to know he'd start working it out that quickly?" she said, before shaking her head as she realised she was talking to a dragon. "Why am I…?"  
  
Her voice trailed off as she took in the tentative expression on the Night Fury's face, the black dragon looking at her in a manner that she would have considered a 'You'll see' look if she had been looking at a human.  
  
"You… you really understand this, don't you?" she said, looking cautiously at the dragon. "You _actually_ get what we're saying to you…"  
  
Toothless let out a rumble and shook his head in a manner that put Clarke in mind of a human saying 'obviously'.  
  
"Whoa…" Clarke smiled at the Night Fury.  
  
She'd assumed that Griffin had been able to understand various key terms like the idea of letting her ride him because the dragons had been genetically programmed to respond to humans in that manner in the first place. The idea that the dragons were smart enough for Toothless to understand what Hiccup was planning to do with that sword and vase and express scepticism about his rider's ability to pull it off…  
  
Regardless of how long it would take to resolve the current situation with the Gronckles, she now had a new goal to work on; spend more time with Griffin so that she could reach the same point in their own relationship that Hiccup and Toothless had reached in their relationship.  
  
 _I_ am _a dragon rider now, after all; I might as well make sure I'm doing it properly…_


End file.
